ABSTRACT
Scholars frequently view the early years of the Accademia di San Luca — the artists’ academy founded in Rome in the late sixteenth century — through a monocular lens, depending on whether they privilege the theoretical, the documentary, the visual or the theological foundation of the institution. The reality falls somewhere closer to an Aristotelian mean between these various positions. For example, if we were to read exclusively fifteenth-and sixteenth-century treatises on the visual arts, we might conclude that painters of the period were an exceptional lot, belonging to a class of liberal practitioners who, like physicians, lawyers and literati, were engaged in an intrinsically worthy profession: not defending or saving lives, perhaps, but providing moral and spiritual guidance through the product of their work, which could, in turn, edify minds and save souls. Whereas early writers of these tracts, such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci emphasized the foundations of painting in the hard sciences of anatomy, perspective and optics, and touted its goals as revealing ‘universal’ truths, later authors, such as Ludovico Dolce and Paolo Pino stressed the relationship between painting and the other liberal arts, often analogizing the seriousness of their intellectual endeavours and the significance of their shared goals, whether in the service of the state or of the Catholic Church.1 Responding precisely to such treatises, Romano Alberti, on behalf of the Accademia di San Luca, published the Trattato della nobiltà della pittura (1585), in which he argued that the art of painting embodied all three levels of nobility: 1) civic/political/extrinsic; 2) natural/philosophical/intrinsic; and 3) theological/ spiritual/grace-given.2 Drawing heavily on the recently published Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582) by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, Alberti’s text hews a course for the painter between the juridical, the moral and the theological concepts of nobility and makes some of the boldest claims for the profession uttered during a defining moment in the history of the Counter-Reformation. In addition, Dolce, Giovanni Battista Armenini, Giorgio Vasari and others underscored that disegno was an attribute shared by artists and gentlemen, bolstering the claims for the liberality of the artist’s profession by analogy and by example.3
