Arte e scrittura nella Firenze del Quattrocento, i commentarii di Lorenzo Ghiberti

grantor: University of TorontoLorenzo Ghiberti, the great sculptor of the doors of the Baptistery in Florence dedicated himself in his late years to the compilation of a treatise on art, into which he poured all his knowledge and experience in the field. That work, known by the apocryphal title of Commentarii, and written between 1447-48 and 1455, the year of Ghiberti's death, is the last project of a man who lived as the chief protagonist in the artistic scene of early fifteenth-century Florence. Ghiberti's references vary from the classical sources on the art of antiquity, such as Pliny and Vitruvius, to the mediaeval ones on optics (Alhazen, in particular), to his own notes and sketches as he gathered them in his productive workshop. The dissertation provides a critical and philological reassessment of Ghiberti's Commentarii by means of a new transcription of the fifteenth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence (Fondo Principale II, I, 333, olim Magliabechiano XVII, 33), the only extant manuscript of Ghiberti's text. The philological work here carried out is the basis for a redefinition of the artistic and literary context in which Ghiberti's observations were produced and of the impact that some of the concepts which can be found in the text, such as the memoria-ingenium dichotomy, had on the artistic literature of the century from Leon Battista Alberti to Leonardo and beyond. The new structure of the Commentarii, as it appears after the present philological enquiry, proves to be tighter and possibly more influential on later art historians than has previously been recognized. The philological reassessment of Ghiberti's text suggests a reconsideration of the overall importance of the Commentarii in the development of the modern history of art, particularly vis-a-vis Vasari's Vite. Textual criticism, it is argued, is a necessary basis for the reassessment of art and literature in fifteenth-century Florence and of the role played by Ghiberti's Commentarii in such a cultural context.Ph.D