In Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture, Charles H. Carman argues against viewing Renaissance painting as a secular mode of representing material reality, one divorced from spiritual, religious, and theological worldviews. According to Carman, Renaissance culture was produced and consumed by people more religious and interested in theology than many contemporary scholars will admit. Naturalistic painting in the Renaissance, with its single-point perspective, was not about denying the invisible meanings behind observable reality. Instead, it was a way to represent divine ontology as well as enable spectators to “observe” that ontology with their mind’s eye.

Carman’s argument focuses on two major figures of Renaissance Humanism, the fifteenth-century theologian and Neo-Platonist Nicholas Cusanus and the humanist, painter, and architect Leon Battista Alberti. In chapter 1, Carman divides scholars of Alberti into two groups: first, those who understand Alberti’s On Painting (1436) and its description of single-point perspective as an expression of a secular, rational, and materialistic worldview; and second, those scholars, such as Carman, who deny any radical break between medieval and early Renaissance culture and, therefore, understand Alberti’s work in the context of a sincere religious worldview.

Carmen believes that Alberti and Cusanus shared this religious worldview, one in which the infinite and the divine could be uncovered in the material realm of the senses. There is no direct evidence that the two read each other’s works; for instance, it cannot be verified that Cusanus’s theory and theology of vision—in his On Learned Ignorance (1440), for example, or his On the Vision of God (1453)—was influenced by Alberti’s On Painting. And yet the humanist and the theologian both participated in a culture in which the divine and material realms, while distinct, were in a dialectical relationship. They also shared in a culture of visuality in which physical vision and the intellectual ability of one’s “mind’s eye” to perceive meaning were in a dialectical relationship.

To help frame this discussion, I believe it is useful to remember that there were two main traditions of thought about vision in pre-modern Europe. The first maintained that knowledge derived from vision, like knowledge derived from all other sense perceptions, was inherently deceiving and, therefore, always suspect. The second tradition approached vision as a mode of inquiry that enabled a viewer to uncover the divine behind the merely material, the fixed and eternal behind the constantly changing and ephemeral. Carman argues that Alberti and Cusanus subscribed to the latter tradition. Moreover, as Carman deftly demonstrates in his readings of Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis (1470s) and Masaccio’s Tribute Money (1425), Renaissance artists subscribed to that latter tradition as well. Artists did more than choose religious subject matter for their paintings; their use of naturalism and single-point perspective was also meant to direct the mind and intellect of the painting’s spectators to the infinite and divine realm. Carman asserts, and I agree, that it is much harder for us, than it was for Renaissance artists and thinkers, to accept the paradox of using material and sensuous mediums to uncover and try to understand God’s infinite creation. The true ingegno of the painter involved successfully representing not what is visible to the physical eye, but what is invisible to one’s mind’s eye.

Carman organizes each subsequent chapter around key passages and images that elucidate his main thesis. For example, in chapter 2, he convincingly argues that the figure of Narcissus, which Alberti identifies in On Painting as the inventor of painting, does not represent the deceiving power of vision, but rather the transformative power of painting, a power that equals the transformative power of the intellect. Carman also examines Alberti’s use of the figure of Minerva. While Minerva is traditionally associated with sensuous and material knowledge, Carman demonstrates how for Alberti, Minerva and Narcissus allude to the dialectical relationship of the material and the intellectual. Painting—a material product—can reveal and recognize the theological and divine meanings behind the material.

Carman proceeds to examine Alberti’s famous impresa of a winged eye (chapter 3) and other metaphors that Alberti, Cusanus, and Renaissance artists employed, such as the mirror (chapter 5), the window, the flower, and the map (chapter 6). He shows how a nuanced interpretation of these elements supports his understanding that the Renaissance epistemology of vision focused on what lies beyond the physical and material elements of ontology. Ultimately, Carman constructs a convincing argument for understanding Alberti within a medieval epistemological tradition of vision that preceded the Renaissance, a context that is often neglected because of the general propensity to view the Renaissance as the harbinger of modernity, secularism, and rationality.

The main strength of this book lies in Carman’s aptitude for close reading, and his keen analyses provide a fresh and nuanced encounter with Alberti’s On Painting. Carman also performs thorough inquiries into the meaning of key terms in Alberti’s work, such as istoria and nature. When Carman asks what did nature mean “for the Renaissance” (16), however, we can surely agree there was no single homogenous Renaissance perception or even two opposing views; cultures are rarely so tidy. Moreover, individuals referring to “nature,” such as Alberti, might have meant different things at different times and in different contexts. Carman’s tendency to simplify also reveals itself in his division of Renaissance scholarship into two camps, those who perceive the Renaissance and its art as secular, material, and rational and those who view it as religious, spiritual, and symbolic. Thus throughout the book, and especially in the somewhat tedious review of the literature in chapter 1, Carman refers to the “conservative” camp and to the, presumably, progressive camp, to which he belongs. I found this division to obscure rather than illuminate what is at stake for scholars of the Renaissance.

To establish parallels between Alberti’s and Cusanus’s epistemologies of vision, Carman believes he must refute the notion that behind a painting of single-point perspective exists an assumption of one ideal position from which it can be viewed. This idea, Carman claims, has been disproven by him (and others); if a spectator changes her or his position and moves from the center, the projection from the vanishing point does not actually become distorted (95). I would suggest that the fact that it is not the case is beside the point. The point is not what actually happens when one does or does not view the painting from the center, but what Alberti thought would happen or wished would happen. Nothing in On Painting suggests that Alberti envisioned autonomous spectators who are creative in their reading of the istoria. Rather, in On Painting, Alberti prescribes both an ideal istoria and ideal spectators. Thus in his perfect istoria, there is always a figure who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look, or with ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them (Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, London: Penguin Books, 1991, book 2, 42, 77–78).

Finally, I wonder if Carman’s examination of vision and single-point perspective as modes of knowing would have benefited from engaging with the literature on the changing status of Renaissance artists as well as with the literature on Renaissance perceptions of knowledge as scientia, or certain knowledge, and techne, or craft knowledge. (Pamela H. Smith’s The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004] comes to mind.) Also, while it is hard to fault an author instead of his editor for spelling mistakes, there are quite a few of them in the book (for example on page 6, where “Santinello’s” should have been “Santinello,” and on page 11, where “fairy” should have been “fairly”).

Carman does not offer a dramatically new understanding of single-point perspective, Renaissance painting, or Alberti’s epistemology of vision. For a few decades now, scholars of the Renaissance have been arguing that linear perspective, and Renaissance culture in general, alluded to something beyond the merely material. Samuel Y. Edgerton, for example, argued as much in The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975, 16–31) forty years ago. Although Carman indicates that Edgerton did not take this far enough (104, 125), not everyone will agree. Nevertheless, his sophisticated readings of Alberti’s work buttress the view that Renaissance culture was not only interested in that which can be observed in nature, but it also continued the medieval search for the ideal and fixed ontology of reality.