Leonardo's Paragone

The result of research on the history of mechanical engineering and design, this study identifies Leonardo’s innovative approaches to technical problems, correcting previous assumptions about his lack of technical knowledge as an engineer. Innovative strategies include his use of Euclidian and Archimedean geometry, dimetric parallel projection, consistency of scale, proportions of one-third throughout the structure, and proportional calculations of its force. The sophistication and precision of the drawing, compared with others by Leonardo and his contemporaries, locates it among his plans for a military treatise, re-dates it to a later period of 1490-93, and associates it with similar working methods across disciplines at the turn of the sixteenth century.

Publius Ovid’s (43 BC-17/18 AD) describes in his Metamorphoses Niobe’s transformation into a weeping rock. Niobe’s transformation incorporates the form and matter of the medium of sculpture. According to the humanist paragone debate, painting and sculpture struggle to be the medium with the highest qualities of virtuosity. Aby Warburg (1866-1929) refers to the Niobe motif’s Nachleben in his Tafel 5: Beraubte Mutter. (Niobe, Flucht und Schrecken). This displays the images of both the bereaved mother (Niobe) and the murderous mother (Medea). The montage also introduces the theme of the descent to the underworld. It becomes clear how the cluster of motifs around the figure of Niobe - hybris, lamentatio and the chthonic substrate - functions as a direct entry to a bipolar hermeneutics of the visual medium: the ‘historical psychology of human expression’ that navigates between Apollo and Dionysus. The “weeping rock” that according to legend still stands on Mount Sipylus in Turkey, draws upon deeper anthropological patterns. Petrification indicates inertia, frigidity and a Medusan psychosis of fear. In nature, stones and rocks have a “slumbering insistence” that can be captivating. Stones are after all visible but impenetrable, they index an irrevocable absence in their presence, and ‘have abode’ in an otherworldly region of utter blindness and silence. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Niobe’s petrifaction symbolises the straitening of her life and the loss of anima within a culture divorced from authentic feeling, nature, and instinct. Here Niobe meets Echo.

This article contends that a modern discourse about sculpture as an art originated in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries in Italy. It suggests that sculpture's specificity, e.g. its merits and limitations, came to be defined mainly through a comparison with painting that was at once practical and theoretical. People in Italy at the time understood their encounters with artistic objects aesthetically and strived to acquire knowledge of art. Drawing and visual note-taking played fundamental roles in their connoisseurial training. Connoisseurs and artists alike talked, wrote and polemicized about art. They did so in their own terms, though often they borrowed ancient writers' words, concepts and biases. They also believed that ancient painting had been totally obliterated and could only be read about in books. Conversely, ancient sculpture had survived and thus provided a touchstone against which to measure the skills of coeval sculptors, albeit one that – it is argued herein – condemned them to anonymity.

The fascinating issue underlying Benedetto Varchi's Due Lezzioni opens up a multiplicity of views and approaches. At the crossroads of disciplines and sectors that are often separated, the dispute on the 'Paragone' requires an effort of interdisciplinary openness in order to bring together aspects that are otherwise unconnected and therefore poorly understood.
The debate decisively involves the artists' approach to operative practice: in the lines of the letters to Varchi we can gather important indications on executive practices considered to be for 'insiders', and for this reason normally concealed.
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L’affascinante tematica sottesa alle Due Lezzioni di Benedetto Varchi apre una molteplicità di sguardi e di possibilità di approccio. Crocevia di discipline e di settori spesso separati, la disputa sulla maggioranza delle arti obbliga a uno sforzo di apertura interdisciplinare per coniugare aspetti  altrimenti slegati e per questo poco compresi. Il dibattito coinvolge in maniera determinante l’approccio degli artisti alla prassi operativa: fra le righe delle lettere al Varchi possiamo cogliere indicazioni importanti su pratiche esecutive considerate da ‘addetti ai lavori’, e per questo normalmente sottaciute.

Introdução/Intradução. Mimesis, tradução, Enárgeia e a Tradição da ut pictura poesis”, in: G.E. Lessing, Laocoonte. Ou sobre as Fronteiras da Poesia e da Pintura, introdução, tradução e notas Márcio Seligmann-Silva, São Paulo: Iluminuras/Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1998, pp. 7-72.

L¹articolo riprende in esame la Madonna col Bambino di Pietro Bussolo (Milano, circa 1454-Bergamo 1526), attribuita a Pietro Bussolo nel Santuario di Santa Maria del Giglio a Nese, Alzano Lombardo (BG) esposta a Bergamo, Palazzo della Ragione, nel 2016. Il confronto con le opere datate di Bussolo consente di precisarne la collocazione cronologica tra la fine del nono e l’inizio dell’ultimo decennio del Quattrocento, in un momento di stretta connessione con i fatti artistici milanesi.
La statua rappresenta l¹episodio di più stretta vicinanza tra l¹intagliatore e le ricerche condotte da Leonardo e dimostra la ricezione delle riflessioni sulla scultura del maestro fiorentino. Bussolo non si limita alla citazione di motivi dalla prima versione della Vergine delle Rocce (1483-1485) ma giunge a modificare la concezione della statua propria della tradizione della scultura lignea lombarda.

Le Johannesschüssel ressortit indéniablement à l’histoire anthropologique
de la fascination pour les têtes et les décapitations, les crânes
et les récipients. L’objet plonge ses racines dans le sacrifice sanglant
(l’Eucharistie), le totémisme, l’apotropaion, le cannibalisme, les trophées
et les rites de trépanation, suivis à l’occasion de la consommation de la
cervelle10. Dans le contexte présent d’une anthologie sur ‘pietà e visione’»,
je m’en tiendrai cependant aux stratégies visuelles et à l’impact dévotionnel
de la tête décapitée de Saint-Jean dans les arts de la peinture et de la
sculpture.

Starting from a careful reconsideration of the well-known 1490 ‘proemio’ about the «man without letters», this paper aims to analyze several passages of Leonardo’s manuscripts in order to shed new light on his
complex relationship with Renaissance humanism, intended as rebirth via the study of classical antiquity. It then outlines the vast distance separating him from ‘humanistic ideology’, as distinct from humanism and to be identified with the enthusiastic (and very popular in 15th century Italian culture) description of the human being as magnum miraculum and privileged center of the universe. Special attention is focused on the new grounds on which Leonardo tries to establish dignitas and excellentia hominis, pointing out the epistemological primacy of painting.