| Nicholas of Cusa, Alberti and the Architectonics of the Mind |
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Università degli Studi di Firenze, ITALY
One
of the single most important ideas emerging from Alberti's concepts
is that of the relationship between the artist's ingenuity and
his natural and social surroundings, that is, the relationship
between the world and the artist's representation of it. It has
been noted that this concept resonates singularly with that of
Nicholas of Cusa, with whom Alberti shared mutual friendships.
The idea of the creativity of the artist's mind, including thoughts
on his relationship to the world around him, his capacity to
harmoniously reconstruct in accordance with innate proportions
(the mind is the locus of proportion, Nicholas wrote) and the
beauty of discordant, contradictory Nature, is clearly developed
in De Mente and other works anterior to 1450, when Alberti
labored over De re aedificatoria. Nicholas' idea of the
architectonic vis of the human mind finds a singular consonance
with Alberti's vis compositionis, according to which the
artist imitates the divine ars in recomposing the contradictions,
irregularities and even monstrosities of the world. Neither Nicholas
nor Alberti presents the concept of the relationship between
the artist and the world around him as something tranquil and
objectively given, but rather as a continuing tension. It is
a personal conquest by the artist's ingenuity that corrects and
upholds the mira vis creatrix of nature. In part, the
painter must draw out of nature the beauty that certainly exists
but is not always apparent, and in part he must be capable of
drawing it out of himself.
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Graziella Federici Vescovini, "Nicholas of Cusa, Alberti and the Architectonics of the Mind", pp. 159-171 in Nexus II: Architecture and Mathematics, ed. Kim Williams, Fucecchio (Florence): Edizioni dell'Erba, 1998. http://www.nexusjournal.com/conferences/N1999-Vescovini.html |
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