Repository | Book | Chapter

Painting's own momentum in representing its subject, its control over the aspects of the world which it abstracts and combines — and which it transforms through its own procedures — has been the recurrent theme of critical commentary from Alberti and Vasari¹ to the present. What has varied is the way in which this momentum and transformation has been felt to demand commentary. Among the several ways Alberti conceived this transformation was on analogy with the co-ordination of parts within the structure of a sentence. And this is similar to Vasari's sense of disegno, the mind's grasp of things realized in the fluent delineation of them. It is that grasp of things, that continuity and assurance of thought that we find for instance in a drawing by Raphael where the spiralling rhythm registers and connects the complex forms of the Virgin's turning body, her foreshortened arm, the articulation of her wrist, and the torsion of the reaching child, and it does all this without loss of its own graphic impulse [PL. 2]. That sustained impulse in the drawing implies that all these details have been held in mind and the drawing has subsumed them within its own continuous movement. The thought in drawing and painting may not always be manifested by fluency: it may involve an accumulation of adjustments, self-monitoring, self-revising.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-3847-2_1

Full citation: