Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s “Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura”: Color, Perspective and Anatomy. Barbara Tramelli. Nuncius Series: Studies and Sources in the Material and Visual History of Science 1. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xii + 254 pp. $145.
icant case studies of art that expresses “subjects, forms, materials and the processes of painting” (304). The notebook of Leonardo in particular produced many new and inspiring approaches that benefitted from such texts in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, such as Cennino Cennini’s functional recipe and Alberti’s On Painting. The latter was completed in about 1435 and aimed to rebuild intellectual knowledge of art, such as the mathematical formulation of space and principles of color and perspective. Leonardo then shifted the intellectual status of painting in its position and hierarchy, the conceptual change in art thus being read and understood by way of technical writings on the part of successive generations of authors. In the field of art history, technical texts have tended to be ignored, more or less, because of their complex nature. With this book, Cerasuolo makes an inspiring effort to meet a great challenge by shaping an approach that contributes to the study of art history through a discussion of technical writings that “occupy a hinterland which borders on several areas and disciplines” (1). The book also provides an overall outline that retraces the procedures that contributed to the art of sixteenth-century Italy by detailing the materials and processes behind it. For the study of art theory, practice, and conservation science, and in delineating how to read the value and significance of technical texts in their historical context and in their in illumination of technique and style, text, and conception of art, Literature and Artistic Practice in Sixteenth-Century Italy represents a new achievement in the study of art history.