\u27HISTORIA\u27 IN LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI\u27S ON PAINTING AND IN ANDREA MANTEGNA\u27S CIRCUMCISION OF CHRIST (ITALY)

In fifteenth-century Italy, it became a commonplace in art theory that the greatest work of painting was historia. Modern critics loosely translate historia as narrative painting and, consequently, understand the commonplace as an expression of a Renaissance preference for works of art with literary subjects. But when a thinker of Leon Battista Alberti\u27s learning proposes to equate artistically composed painting with historia, he does not do so casually; rather, he uses the word historia with an awareness of its place and meaning within a centuries-old tradition of intellectual discourse. The purpose of this dissertation is to recover the meaning of historia in Alberti\u27s theory of art and to show how the conception of painting as historia affected the artistic practice of the great Quattrocento painter Andrea Mantegna. Chapter one traces the development of the concept of historia in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Both pagan and Christian thinkers defined historia in terms of its significance. For pagan thinkers, the significance of historia was rhetorical; for Christians, it was the eternal truth of Christianity. Chapter two considers the significance of historia in Alberti\u27s treatise On Painting. The equation of painting with historia, which he proposed, depended on the medieval understanding of historia. However, in order to describe an art that would imbue the pictorial work with the multi-level significance of medieval historia, Alberti drew on classical rhetoric. Chapter three analyzes the compositional and iconographical problems an artist of Mantegna\u27s stature faced when he undertook to paint a historia. Mantegna realized that the symbolic motifs used by medieval artists to convey the sacramental significance of the Circumcision of Christ were incompatible with the representational fidelity of historia. Yet, to delete these motifs would have violated his sense of history by rending the rite from the context that expressed its significance. In resolving this incongruity between the symbolic means and the expressive end of painting as historia, Mantegna arrived at an understanding of the biblical account of Circumcision that had no precedent in written theology