Cennino Cennini and Leon Battista Alberti: Two parallel realities in the Italian Quattrocento

This dissertation examines the theory and the practice of art in the Italian Quattrocento, with particular attention to the art treatises of Cennino Cennini and Leon Battista Alberti. The emergence of art criticism in Renaissance Italy and its flourishing through the seventeenth century produced a split between theory and artistic practice: writing on art became a specialized activity practiced in academia by a restricted circle of intellectuals who were often either unaware or unappreciative of the aesthetic research pursued by practicing artists. This situation persists in contemporary criticism. Alberti has continued to be considered the exemplary Renaissance man Burckhardt proclaimed him to be, while Cennini is officially considered a fourteenth-century artisan, writer of a technical handbook. However, this classification of Cennini's Libro dell'Arte is problematic, and there is no valid reason to interpret his work as the archetypal product of a medieval workshop. I argue instead that Cennini and Alberti represent two parallel realities in the Italian Quattrocento: their writings exemplify two disparate experiences coexisting in the complex structure of Quattrocento society. Cennini is an artisan who writes about his daily work in the traditional Quattrocento bottega, while Alberti is a scholar of multiple talents, deeply involved in his career as a humanist and living in an aristocratic world to which the artisan Cennini did not have access. The difference between the two lies not in chronology but in character and experience; the commonplace historical classification which aligns an old Cennino with a medieval tradition, in contrast with the resurgent vitality of the following period embodied in Alberti's intellectual interests, is simply incorrect. The misleading habit of assigning characters neatly to separate centuries, combined with the old assumption that theory is a more sophisticated mode of interpretation while practice is a ‘mechanical’ art, is perpetuated even by the subtlest of modern scholars, despite current efforts at a realistic reevaluation of the Renaissance. Alberti's theoretical propensity represents a conceptual mode of modern thought rather than the fifteenth-century artistic world in general.