Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford-Warburg Studies)

This entire book is about the origin of the term "composition" when applied to painting, which began only in the 15th century. It carefully--one might say tediously, but I think the length and examples are necessary--proves a single point: that, when Italian Renaissance painters spoke about "composition", they meant a grammatical / syntactic structure isomorphic to the syntactic patterns that early humanist writers used in imitation of Western Roman models of Latin (especially Cicero).This point was crucial to me, because I'm studying the history of the metaphysics of art, and there is a major divide between the art of cultures which believe that the properties of objects can arise from causal relationships in their mechanical structures, versus traditional Platonist essentialist metaphysics, under which the properties of objects come from their essence (soul), not their material composition. This distinction is why medieval drawings and maps (except portolano charts), and most representative art before the Renaissance other than that of Hellenistic Greece (including that of India, Asia, and the Americas), disregard and omit space between objects or places.My problem was that painters often applied the term "composition" to artworks which clearly assume Platonist metaphysics (including modern art). If the term "composition" meant what it does in the phrase "chemical composition", or the sense in which composition is used by the Patent Office, that would endorse mechanistic, anti-Platonist metaphysics.This book demonstrated conclusively that that is not what painters mean by "composition". Composition was originally used to refer to putting objects in a picture in a spatial layout which constructs an ontological and sometimes causal hierarchy (which elements dominate which, and which elements are tokens of a single type), in the same way that ancient Latin rhetoricians structured long sentences symmetrically to make the causal relationships among the clauses clear. This is topological, not spatial--the relative positions and symmetries matter (for example, figures that are above the others, or more central, or highlighted via contrast or lighting, are usually higher up in the hierarchy, with the notable exceptions of angels and souls of dead saints, who typically appear above Jesus to indicate that Jesus partakes in both the heavenly and earthly realms). The distances do not. So pictorial "composition" conveys relationships, primary those of authority, but doesn't invoke causal mechanical composition (as in a Swiss watch).

The book is really illuminating about the Renaissance. For example, at the time of Giotto, Italian was not a totally developed language and therefore each of the different city states had substantial language differences. The humanists were trying to recreate a pre-medieval Latin. This meant that they were readily employable in Rome. This explains why artists more readily move from their home town to Rome than to another region. That is an insight alone well worth reading the book for.

not to be missed!

Tackles the knotty subject of Humanism and its impact on the Renaissance in an intelligently inspired way. Would recommend this for anyone grappling with questions about revivals of classicism and use of secular subject matter in art, highlights texts and treatises read by the intellectuals of the time.