ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of Stokes's essay 'Pisanello', written in 1928. It is the first of his mature writings on art and architecture and, significantly, the piece selected by Lawrence Gowing to open his edition of The Critical Writings — although, as we shall see, only as a fragment. 'Pisanello' sites Stokes at a telling instant in his maturation. As the previous chapters have shown, relations with members of the 'alternative Bloomsbury', such as Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, had enlarged his appreciation of art and architecture and had suggested — against the formalism of Fry and Bell — a more inclusive view of art and life. The overruling experience of seeing Alberti's Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini in July 1925 had impelled him towards an architectonic distinct from the plasticity of the Baroque, as advanced by writers such as the Sitwell brothers and Geoffrey Scott in The Architecture of Humanism. This trajectory towards a harder-edged aesthetic was confirmed by his relations with Ezra Pound. Stokes's writing can be construed, taking Manfredo Tafuri's terminology, as an 'operative criticism' that seeks to discover potentialities for the present through a critical engagement with the past: like the equally 'operative' Pound he admired the clear-cut clarity of early Renaissance art. 'Pisanello' discloses multiple perspectives in Stokes's evolving theory of art as he attempts to define 'an architectonic embraced by the senses as well as by the mind'. 1 (Figure 4.1)
