Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy

1. 15th-Century Paintings Were Bespoke Products of Client-Painter Deals.

The better sort of fifteenth-century painting was made on a bespoke basis, the client asking for a manufacture after his own specifications.

Client-driven creation. Unlike today's art market where painters create and then seek buyers, 15th-century Italian painting, especially significant works like altarpieces and frescoes, was primarily commissioned. Clients were active participants, initiating the work, choosing the artist, defining the purpose, and often specifying details through legal agreements. This made the painting a "deposit of a social relationship."

Contracts defined terms. Formal documents like contracts and memoranda outlined the obligations of both painter and client. These agreements typically covered:

• Subject matter (often referencing a drawing)
• Payment schedule and amount
• Quality of materials (especially expensive pigments like ultramarine)
• Delivery timeline and penalties

Beyond mere decoration. Clients' motives for commissioning art were complex, including piety, civic pride, self-commemoration, the pleasure of spending wealth well (especially for those like usurers), and personal enjoyment. These institutional forms implicitly rationalized their motives and guided the painter on what was needed, ensuring the picture served its primary use: being looked at for pleasing, memorable, and profitable stimulation.

2. Clients Increasingly Paid for Skill ("Brush") Over Precious Materials.

While precious pigments become less prominent, a demand for pictorial skill becomes more so.

Shift in conspicuous consumption. Over the 15th century, there was a noticeable trend in contracts away from emphasizing expensive materials like gold and ultramarine. This mirrored a broader social shift towards more restrained forms of display, seen even in clothing fashions moving towards black instead of gilt fabrics. The focus of opulence shifted from the cost of materials to the cost of the painter's skill.

Skill as a valuable commodity. The value of the master painter's time and skill was significantly higher than that of his assistants. Clients could conspicuously spend money on skill by demanding a higher proportion of the work be done by the master's own hand ("pel suo pennello"). Contracts began to include clauses specifying that the master, particularly, should paint the figures or mix the colors.

Skill vs. material value. The distinction between the value of material and the value of skilled labor was central to costing any manufacture, including painting. This economic reality reinforced the intellectual concept, articulated by figures like Alberti, that representing effects like gold with paint and skill was more admirable than simply applying the material itself. The client became a discerning buyer of this expensive, visible skill.

3. The "Period Eye" Interpreted Art Through Daily Visual Experiences.

Everyone, in fact, processes the data from the eye with different equipment.

Experience shapes perception. Visual perception is not uniform; the brain interprets raw visual data using learned skills, categories, and habits of inference developed from experience. This "cognitive style" varies from person to person and, significantly, from culture to culture. A 15th-century Italian saw things differently than a modern viewer or a contemporary Chinese person.

Applying daily skills to art. Looking at paintings was an "institution" in the Quattrocento, where cultivated viewers were expected to make discriminations about skill. The visual skills used were often not unique to painting but derived from daily life. A person's capacity to analyze forms, judge proportions, or interpret gestures, honed by activities like commerce, religious practice, or social interaction, directly influenced how they perceived and appreciated a painting.

Taste reflects skill alignment. Enjoyment of a painting often stemmed from the alignment between the discriminations demanded by the artwork and the visual skills possessed by the beholder. Paintings that offered opportunities to exercise valued skills, like analyzing geometric forms or interpreting figure groupings, were particularly appreciated. The painter responded to this, sharing and catering to the visual habits of their public.

4. Religious Images Functioned as Tools for Instruction, Memory, and Devotion.

Know that there were three reasons for the institution of images in churches. First, for the instruction of simple people... Second, so that the mystery... may be the more active in our memory... Third, to excite feelings of devotion...

Church's purpose for images. According to ecclesiastical theory, images in churches served clear functions:

• Instruction: Teaching illiterate people biblical stories and the lives of saints, acting as "books."
• Memory: Helping viewers remember key religious events and figures by presenting them visually.
• Devotion: Arousing pious feelings more effectively through sight than through hearing.

Qualities for religious function. This meant painters were expected to create pictures that were lucid (clear for the simple), vividly memorable (eye-catching for the forgetful), and emotionally stirring (using the power of sight). While abuses like idolatry or painting apocryphal/frivolous content existed, the core expectation was that images should effectively serve these three purposes.

Preachers and painters as partners. Preachers often discoursed on the same stories depicted by painters, providing emotional categorization and physical details tied to the mysteries. Sermons drilled congregations in interpreting these narratives, making the public well-prepared to engage with the visual representations in paintings. The preacher and the painter acted as mutual "repetiteurs" for the holy stories.

5. Painters Complemented the Public's Personal Visual Meditations.

The public mind was not a blank tablet on which the painters' representations of a story or person could impress themselves; it was an active institution of interior visualization with which every painter had to get along.

Interior visualization practice. Pious individuals were often amateur visualizers of holy stories, practicing spiritual exercises that involved vividly imagining scenes from the lives of Christ and Mary, sometimes even setting them in familiar locations and casting them with known people. Handbooks like the Giardino de Oration guided this detailed, personal imaginative activity.

Painter's role: Structure and concreteness. Painters could not compete with the specific, personal detail of these private visualizations. Instead, they offered something complementary: generalized, unparticularized figures and places that were nonetheless massively concrete and arranged in patterns of strong narrative suggestion. These qualities—concreteness and structure—were difficult to achieve in mental images but were powerfully delivered by the physical painting.

A cooperative experience. The 15th-century experience of a painting was thus an interaction between the physical artwork and the beholder's pre-existing interior visualizations. The painting provided a firm, structured base upon which the viewer could impose their own personal details. This cooperative dynamic explains why painters popular in pious circles, like Perugino, often depicted general types rather than highly individualized figures.

6. Figure Movement and Gesture Formed a Key Narrative Language.

We may miss very much more by not sharing these people's sense of close relation between movement of the body and movement of the soul and mind.

Body reflects soul. Renaissance culture deeply believed in a close connection between physical movement and internal states of mind or soul. This was reflected in treatises on painting and dancing, and in everyday judgments of people's character based on their bearing and actions. Painters used this understanding to convey narrative and emotion through the poses and gestures of their figures.

Gesture as codified language. Gesture was a particularly conventionalized form of physical expression. While secular gestures changed with fashion, pious gestures were more stable and sometimes codified, for example, in Benedictine sign language or preachers' manuals. These sources offer clues to interpreting gestures in paintings, such as:

• Hand on breast for grief or meditation
• Hands raised for joy or devotion
• Extended hand with slightly fanned fingers for invitation

Beyond simple actions. Painters worked with nuances, using subtle groupings and attitudes to suggest complex intellectual or emotional relationships (hostility, love, communication) rather than just depicting overt actions like fighting or embracing. This muted mode of physical relationship drew on a vernacular understanding of expressive grouping, seen in humbler media like woodcuts, but refined it into a sophisticated pictorial art.

7. Commercial Skills (Gauging, Proportion) Shaped Visual Analysis of Form.

The skills that Piero or any painter used to analyse the forms he painted were the same as Piero or any commercial person used for surveying quantities.

Mathematics of the marketplace. Commercial mathematics, particularly gauging (calculating volume) and the Rule of Three (geometric proportion), was a central part of middle-class education in 15th-century Italy. Merchants were adept at reducing complex, irregular objects (barrels, bales, piles of grain) to combinations of simple geometric forms for calculation.

Shared analytical habits. This habit of geometrical analysis was directly relevant to how painters analyzed and represented forms. Painters like Piero della Francesca, who wrote a mathematical handbook for merchants, shared these skills. They would analyze figures and objects as compounds of cylinders, cones, and cubes, and their public was equipped to recognize this underlying structure.

Proportion and harmony. The Rule of Three, used for commercial problems like currency exchange and partnership profit sharing, was a method for understanding ratios and geometric proportion. This skill connected directly to the study of harmonic proportion, used in music, architecture, and sometimes painting. The sequence 6:8:9:12, fundamental to the Pythagorean harmonic scale, was also a standard Rule of Three problem, making harmonic relationships accessible to the commercially educated eye.

8. Painters Asserted Conspicuous Skill, Often Through Playful Virtuosity.

It was for conspicuous skill his patron paid him.

Skill as a form of display. As clients shifted from demanding expensive materials to demanding expensive skill, painters were encouraged to make their skill visible and perceptible to the beholder. This led to a focus on techniques that showcased the artist's virtuosity.

Playful application of skills. Painters often asserted their skills playfully, using techniques derived from daily life in unexpected or exaggerated ways. For example, Uccello's treatment of Niccolo da Tolentino's hat in the Battle of San Romano can be seen as a "serial geometrical joke," demanding the viewer apply their gauging skills to a seemingly simple form. Piero della Francesca's use of a pavilion, a common gauging exercise object, invited his public to engage their commercial-mathematical skills.

Rewarding the beholder's effort. These displays of skill were not just for the painter; they demanded and rewarded the beholder's own visual and intellectual effort. Recognizing the geometric analysis in a figure or the proportional relationships in a composition provided a satisfying sense of insight and mastery for the viewer, making the painting more engaging and appreciated.

9. Critics Used Workshop Terms and Social Metaphors to Describe Style.

Like Pliny he used metaphors, whether of his own coinage or of his own culture, referring aspects of the pictorial style of his time to the social or literary style of his time... Like Pliny too he uses terms from the artists' workshop...

Landino's critical approach. Cristoforo Landino, a humanist and rhetorician, provided a key example of Quattrocento art criticism accessible to a general educated public. He described painters' styles using a blend of language:

• Workshop terms: Technical concepts familiar in the painter's studio (e.g., rilievo, prospettiva, disegno).
• Social/Literary metaphors: Words borrowed from other cultural domains (e.g., puro, gratioso, prompto, vezzoso, devoto).

Bridging art and life. This dual approach allowed Landino to connect pictorial qualities to broader cultural values and experiences. Terms like "virile air" (Botticelli) or "sweet air" (Filippino Lippi) linked artistic style to social characterizations. "Pure" (Masaccio) borrowed from literary criticism's concept of unadorned style, while "devout" (Fra Angelico) drew from the classification of sermon styles.

A structured vocabulary. Landino's analysis of painters like Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Castagno, and Fra Angelico provided a basic conceptual framework for discussing pictorial quality. His terms, often opposed, allied, or overlapping, reflected the specific ways the Quattrocento "period eye" was equipped to perceive and articulate the differences between artists and their works.

10. "Relief" and "Design" Were Fundamental Concepts for Perceiving Form.

The foundations of the art of painting and the starting point for all these works of the hand are disegno and colorire.

Two pillars of painting. According to contemporary handbooks like Cennino Cennini's, the art of painting rested on two fundamental concepts:

• Disegno: Associated with line, contour, and the representation of edges, often achieved through drawing with a pencil or stylus. Castagno was praised as a great disegnatore.
• Colorire: Associated with the application of pigment, tones, and the representation of surfaces and how they receive light. Filippo Lippi was noted for his colorire.

Line vs. tone. This created a dichotomy between linear and tonal approaches to representing form. Disegno emphasized the outline and structure, while colorire focused on modeling form through light and shadow (rilievo). While related, these were seen as distinct skills, and painters might be stronger in one than the other.

Rilievo: The appearance of depth. Rilievo (relief) was the quality of forms appearing three-dimensional, achieved through the skillful manipulation of light and dark tones. Masaccio was considered the master of rilievo, making figures appear solid and projecting. This technique was directly linked to colorire, as it involved applying pigments to model surfaces based on a consistent light source.

11. "Variety" and "Composition" Structured the Arrangement of Figures.

I should wish this copiousness to be ornato with a certain varieta.

Beyond mere quantity. While copiousness (a large number of figures and objects) was appreciated, the true value lay in varieta (variety), a diversity and contrast of elements. Alberti emphasized variety in colors and, especially, in the attitudes and movements of figures, ensuring each figure had its own distinct pose and character.

Composition as organizing principle. Composizione was the systematic harmonization of all elements in a picture towards a desired effect. Borrowed from humanist literary criticism, this concept provided a framework for analyzing the structure of a painting, from the arrangement of bodies to the articulation of limbs and surfaces.

Variety and composition together. Landino praised artists like Filippo Lippi and Donatello
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Last updated: May 15, 2025