THE HUMANISTIC THEORY OF PAINTING - College Art Association

UT PICTURA POESIS: HUMANISTIC THEORY OF PAINTING 235
and since its effects on human emotion were the same, was subject to the same laws of
decorum; and if it dealt with religious subjects, it had accordingly to be a categorically
exact, as well as a vivid and moving, illustration of the facts of Christian history and the
truths of theology. This specialized application of the Horatian concept did not outlast
the Mannerist period, but it helped to encourage the view that persisted in the following
century that decorum implied not only representative truth, but truth that was morally
edifying as well. Herein for the seventeenth century, as for Horace, lay its connection with
the precept that art should instruct as well as delight. In the preface to his Confirences
de l'Acade'mie Felibien, for instance, regarded decorum (biense'ance) as "one of the most
necessary elements in painting to instruct the ignorant, and one of the most agreeable in the
eyes of the learned."'83
That it might well be both is apparent from his remarks on decorum that immediately
precede this thoroughly Horatian observation. For they reveal that close connection be-
tween learning and the ability to render things with strict appropriateness already remarked
in Gilio da Fabriano. "Decorum must be observed," writes Fdlibien, out-Horacing Horace,
"in regard to ages, sexes, countries, different professions, manners and customs, passions,
and usages of dress appropriate to each nation. Herein is Raphael admirable, but not so
Titian and Veronese."'84 The formalistic implications of a passage like this-and one will
immediately think of the aridly conventional gestures and expression of much French paint-
ing of the late seventeenth century-are sufficiently obvious. It is clear, moreover, that if
the artist is successfully to observe decorum in its diverse ramifications, he must get his
facts straight about a great variety of men and nations, both ancient and modern; he must
in short be possessed of a truly uncommon erudition. Hence it is that the critics frequently
undertake to instruct the painters in what they must know if they are to be historical
painters worthy of the name. What they tell them, often at great length, Boileau, instruct-
ing the poet concerning decorum, sums up in three lines:
Conservez ' chacun son propre caractere.
Des siecles, des pais, etudiez les mceurs,
Les climats font souvent les diverses humeurs.18
VI-THE LEARNED PAINTER
The theory of the learned painter, twin brother of the learned poet whose prototype was
the doctus poeta of antiquity, was an important element in the doctrine ut pictura poesis.
Furthermore it was an element of great vitality which, gathering girth and momentum in
the sixteenth century, had hardly spent its energy by the end of the eighteenth. Yet as
fashioned by the Italian critics of the Cinquecento, the learned painter is a highly theoretical
personage who, if he cannot be called an actual figment of the imagination, has never had
more than a partial basis in reality; and much of the time he has had no basis there at all.
Now no sympathetic student of the Renaissance will quarrel with the view already expressed
in the fifteenth century by Alberti that the painter will do well to know the poets and
historians who will supply him with subjects of universal interest, and to associate with
poets and learned men of his own day and age who may provide interesting ideas."'8 But
when in the later sixteenth century it is also insisted-and critics of literature were giving
the same advice to the poet-that the painter be learned not only in sacred and profane
183. P. 317.
184. Loc. cit.
185. L'art po/tique, III, 113-I5.
186. See Chapter II and notes 73 and 74.