Looking at Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting through the lens of the works of his contemporary Nicolaus Cusanus, Charles H. Carman attempts to show that “the Renaissance is not so much a beginning of anthropocentrism as it is a point of discovering how the divine is perceived to be evident in the natural world” (16). Based on an imaginative juxtaposition of Alberti’s perspectival method and Cusan speculation, supported by detailed but questionable interpretations of Alberti’s appeals to più grassa Minerva and Narcissus, and buttressed by strong readings of a carefully selected number of Renaissance paintings, this is a challenging if not altogether convincing study. Much here casts new light on familiar material, but as the author knows, the interpretations offered require a sympathetic reader.

Key is Carman’s rejection of an understanding of one-point perspective that insists on its “pragmatism and rationality,” instead of recognizing its “symbolic, suggestive intentions” (88). Alberti’s intention is said to not create “artful pictorial illusion,” but to visualize the divine infinite: “I will argue that the juncture between the finite world of seeing, characterized as the pyramid of vision, and the infinite seeing implied by the pyramid of perspective (‘almost as if to infinity’), which constitutes the surface of the painting functions in effect like Cusanus’s notion of the coincidence of opposites” (21). Carman thus suggests a profound similarity between Cusanus’s diagram of two interlocking pyramids of light and darkness in De Conjecturis and “Alberti’s interlocking pyramids of vision and perspective which we derive from On Painting” (106–07).

Carman knows that his choice “to see the inception of Renaissance perspective in terms of the divine ‘embodied in an empirical reality,’ and not as the beginning of an anthropocentric view” — a choice he takes to be in keeping with “Alberti’s era and with his intentions” (104) — will be challenged. It is opposed by “the belief that a single point construction is meant to be seen and therefore must be seen from a single proper, or correct central position” (95), a belief that understands “this device as enabling a more realistic view of space to satisfy the growing anthropocentric view of an increasingly secularized attitude during the Renaissance” (95). Such a view, Carman counters, presupposes a “cultural outlook that postdates the period in question” (95). But does Alberti not insist that “a painted thing can never appear truthful where there is no definite distance for seeing it” (On Painting, 37)? Pictorial truth is said to have its measure in the position of the observing eye. Given Alberti’s construction, it is easy to determine that place. To be sure, a painting can be viewed from different points of view, but only at the price of pictorial truth. But according to Carman’s reading of the text, “it is not clear that Alberti even insists on a painting being viewed from a single and central position” (95): “I would question, then, the notion that there is, or that Alberti posits that there is, a single point for viewing the pyramid of perspective. Moreover, I would find it difficult to believe he had not judiciously observed the finished effect of the single point construction, in which the centric ray robustly maintains contact with the apex of perspectival recession, much as Cusanus noted the eyes of each monk seem locked onto those of God from every position” (100). Alberti is thus assigned a “seminal role in articulating the importance of single point perspective for complementing a deeply theological meaning” (xii).

I have difficulty detecting such an intent in On Painting. Its very style seems to communicate a very different concern. But Carman sees no significant link between the emergence of Renaissance perspective and the turn away from the theocentric perspective of the medieval. Renaissance humanism, and this is the often-repeated thesis of this book, did not lead to a modern anthropocentrism. But that Alberti, like Cusanus, approvingly cites the much-maligned sophist Protogoras’s “man is the mode and measure of all things” (On Painting, 55) deserves serious consideration. An anthropocentrism announces itself in both thinkers that is not only compatible with, but finds support in the conviction that God created man in his image.