ABSTRACT
For the early Quattrocento, rhetoric meant vocalizing and visualizing the means to understand beyond the frail, tenuous evidence of what God had unfolded for mankind as the physical reality of creation.4 Through the notion of “symbolic space” where, along with Panofsky’s tentative supposition that geometric ordering of spatial representation might express more than just an accurate reflection of how one sees objects in nature, we have suggested how
1 A version of this chapter, here much revised and expanded, was published as “Faith and Vision in Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Reality and Rhetoric in Sacred Space,” in Faith and Fantasy in the Renaissance: Texts, Images, and Religious Practices, ed. Olga Zorzi Pugliese, Ethan Matt Kavaler (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009): 173-90. My thanks to the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies for permission to republish sections of the essay.
