Leon Battista Albertis » De pictura«. Die kunsttheoretische und literarische Legitimierung von Affektübertragung und Kunstgenuß

This is the latest version of this item.

In books 2 and 3 of De pictura, Alberti revalues painting by emphasizing its emotional impact and the pleasure it provides. To do so, he relies on the categories of rhetoric (the power of discourse) on the one hand, and on the reception mechanisms of religious painting (the power of the image) on the other. The article puts forward the thesis that although Alberti clothed his theory of art in a new guise based on ancient rhetoric, he was actually only describing the same mechanisms that every artist and the public knew from medieval and contemporary painting. Alberti's theories were therefore nothing new for the artists (“old wine in new bottles”). As a result, they were quickly forgotten in the 15th century and only rediscovered in the 16th century with the help of a new translation of the Latin text. Alberti's own translation of his Latin text had been overlooked.