2024/10/10 by Warwick, Genevieve
#Bussola #Ottica #Prospettiva #Specchio
paper · doi:10.25433/2038-0488/evz7-y266
Centred on the role of draughtsman’s technologies in the theoretical conceptualisation of disegno, this article interrogates the methods of mimesis by Renaissance art theorists from Filarete and Brunelleschi to Zuccaro and Annibale Carracci. Beginning with fifteenth-century definitions of pictorial disegno in terms of geometrical perspective, it reframes our understanding of the historical development of Renaissance imitatio through the technologies of its instrumentation. It argues that the geometer’s tools of compass, setsquare, and mirror, were the means by which technical draughtsmen effected accurate perspectival rendering of the spatial dimensions of land and building surveyance into architectural blueprints and topographical drawing. It thus demonstrates the critical place of the mirror as a key instrument of translation between three and two dimensions that informed Renaissance drawing as disegno. It analyses the larger significance of Renaissance disegno’s specular conceit in drawing and painting, theory and practice, which extended from the geometry of perspective to the rise of self-portraiture. Through a wide range of sources including treatises, notebooks, prints, paintings and drawings, it charts the development of artistic theories of disegno from Alberti to Leonardo, conceptualised as a mirror reflection of the visible field. It thus rewrites our longheld understanding of disegno as an Albertian ‘window’ by demonstrating its conceptual and practice-based foundation in the ‘mirror’ view of a specular mimesis that would constitute art’s fundamental paradigm until early twentieth-century Abstract art.