ABSTRACT
Alberti, in his Italian version of his treatise On Painting, instructs the painter to create an image that will be understood by the viewer, “both learned and unlearned,” meaning those literate in Latin and those not.3 This assumes shared knowledge of broadly held cultural ideals by two intersecting audiences, the artists who were the intended readers for the vernacular edition-Brunelleschi, Masaccio, et al., mentioned in the Preface to On Painting-and the viewers who “consume” the final product whether Latin literate or not. Our goal then is to look for how Alberti reflects the painter’s and viewer’s propensity to respond to enculturated meaning, how he inflects the way paintings will be “seen.” Important here is the use of the vernacular, the recognition of which deeply concerned Alberti and other leading figures. Increasingly thought to be a language as viable and perhaps more so than classical Latin of the humanist elite, Tuscan was coming to be recognized for its capacity to convey the creativity and vitality of contemporary culture. I cannot help but think that the art of painting, as Alberti had experienced it in Florence and as he then was proposing it to be conceived in his book
1 Much of what constitutes this chapter was first published in Mediaevalia, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Medieval Studies Worldwide, 3, 2012, 169-94. I am grateful to SUNY Albany press for permission to reproduce much of what appeared therein.
