Before the publication of David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters in 2001, it was commonly believed that the first artist to use an optical aid in painting was the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Hockney, however, believes that the use of projected images started much earlier, as early as the fifteenth-century, claiming that evidence can be found in the work of the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. Without rejecting Hockney’s pioneering work in this field, I nevertheless make the perhaps bolder claim that Italian artists were using the aid of image projections even before the time of Jan van Eyck, that is, as early as 1270. Although much of the information required to make an earlier claim for the use of optics can be found in Hockney’s publication, the key to linking all the information together has been missing. It is my unique contention that this key is a letter that has always been believed to have been European in origin. More commonly referred to as Roger Bacon’s Letter I show in detail how this letter was, in fact, not written by Roger Bacon, but addressed to him, and that this letter originated in China. Chinese knowledge about projected images, that is the concept that light-pictures could be received onto appropriate supports, came directly to Europe around 1250. This knowledge was expanded upon by Roger Bacon in his Opus Majus, a document which arrived in Italy in 1268 for the special consideration of Pope Clement IV. The medieval Italian painter Cimabue was able to benefit directly from this information about optical systems, when he himself was in Rome in 1272. He immediately began to copy optical projections, which stimulated the creation of a new, more individualistic, mode of representation in Italian painting from this time forward. The notion that projected images greatly contributed towards the development of naturalism in medieval Italian painting replaces the previously weak supposition that the stimulation was classical or humanist theory, and shows that it was, in fact, far likely something more technical as well. / Art History / D.Litt. et Phil. (Art History)

Répondant au caractère « pelegrino » attribué à Luca Signorelli par son contemporain Giovanni Santi, notreréflexion s’articule autour de la triple itinérance du peintre cortonais. La première, fondée sur une géographieartistique, met en jeu commanditaires et collaborateurs entre centres et périphéries et réévalue son imaged’artiste provincial. Il s’agit consécutivement d’établir l’incidence des dévotions locales sur le langage picturalsignorellien, notamment par le biais de la sacra rappresentazione (I). La seconde itinérance, de typeinterdisciplinaire, s’attache à son traitement de la figure humaine et du nu. L’élaboration de sa vision du corpsest confrontée à l’essor contemporain d’une anatomie scientifique et d’une approche expérimentale ou théorique,ainsi qu’à la question des convenances. La sensibilité tactile particulière de Signorelli, sa position dans le débatnaissant du Paragone et les modalités des transferts entre peinture et sculpture sont examinées, tout commel’éventualité d’un passage à l’acte sculptural (II). L’esprit vagabond de Luca, qui s’affirme enfin par uneitinérance temporelle, oscille entre intérêt pour le passé, goût archaïsant et aspiration au renouveau. Sont ainsiétudiés son rapport à l’art antique et sa place entre « seconda e terza età », en spécifiant ses liens avec l’ars novaet les ferments inédits semés. Au-delà des étiquettes de retardataire local ou de précurseur écrasé par un Michel-Ange, cette étude vise à restituer la curiosité, la sociabilité et les échanges d’un artiste de transition (III). / Giovanni Santi has depicted his contemporary Luca Signorelli as a « pelegrino » painter. From this startingpoint, our study deals with the cortonese master’s triple itinerary. The first one, relative to artistic geography,concerns patrons and collaborators between centers and peripheries and we intend to reappreciate his image of aprovincial artist. We investigate consequently the impact of local devotions and sacra rappresentazione on hispictorial language (I). The second itinerary, a interdisciplinary one, focuses on the treatment of the human figureand on the nude. His vision of the body is compared with the contemporary development of a scientific anatomyand with practical and theoretical approaches. Indeed it raises the question of the proprieties. The tactile qualitiesof signorellian art, his position in the emerging Paragone debate and the modalities of his volumetric translationare also studied ; we consider the possibility of a sculptural activity (II). Finally, Luca’s roaming imaginationarises from a temporal oscillation between interest for the past, archaic taste and an aspiration for renewal. Wethus examine his relationship with antique art and his position between « seconda e terza età », analyzing hisconnections with ars nova and the original seeds he sow. Beyond the reputation of a local latecomer or of aforerunner in the shade of Michelangelo, we aim to emphasize this way the curiosity, the sociability and theexchanges of a transitionary artist (III).

Before the publication of David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters in 2001, it was commonly believed that the first artist to use an optical aid in painting was the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Hockney, however, believes that the use of projected images started much earlier, as early as the fifteenth-century, claiming that evidence can be found in the work of the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. Without rejecting Hockney’s pioneering work in this field, I nevertheless make the perhaps bolder claim that Italian artists were using the aid of image projections even before the time of Jan van Eyck, that is, as early as 1270. Although much of the information required to make an earlier claim for the use of optics can be found in Hockney’s publication, the key to linking all the information together has been missing. It is my unique contention that this key is a letter that has always been believed to have been European in origin. More commonly referred to as Roger Bacon’s Letter I show in detail how this letter was, in fact, not written by Roger Bacon, but addressed to him, and that this letter originated in China. Chinese knowledge about projected images, that is the concept that light-pictures could be received onto appropriate supports, came directly to Europe around 1250. This knowledge was expanded upon by Roger Bacon in his Opus Majus, a document which arrived in Italy in 1268 for the special consideration of Pope Clement IV. The medieval Italian painter Cimabue was able to benefit directly from this information about optical systems, when he himself was in Rome in 1272. He immediately began to copy optical projections, which stimulated the creation of a new, more individualistic, mode of representation in Italian painting from this time forward. The notion that projected images greatly contributed towards the development of naturalism in medieval Italian painting replaces the previously weak supposition that the stimulation was classical or humanist theory, and shows that it was, in fact, far likely something more technical as well. / Art History / D.Litt. et Phil. (Art History)

Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio's Looking Glass is an ironic allusion to both the concave mirror and the biconvex lens. It was these simple objects, in colloquial terms a shaving mirror and a magnifying glass, which Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio, learned from Caravaggio how to use to enhance the natural phenomenon of the camera obscura effect. Painting from a projection meant that Artemisia could achieve an extreme form of realism and detail in her work. This knowledge, which was of necessity kept hidden, spooked the Inquisition and also gave artists, who knew how to manipulate the technology, an extreme competitive edge over their rivals. This dissertation challenges the naive assumptions that have been made about Artemisia's working practices, effectively ignoring the strong causal links between art and science in Seicento Italian painting. Introducing the use of optical aids by Artemisia opens up her story to a whole new generation of scholarship. / Art History / M.A. (Art history)

[pt] A tese Giorgio Morandi e o respeito pelas coisas de uso, retoma a produção artística de Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964, um dos mais importantes artistas italianos do século XX, para restabelecer dentro do período de formação do Modernismo suas relações com a produção cultural europeia coetânea. A tese busca mostrar como a obra de Morandi se apresenta como uma alternativa à interpretação artística hegemônica feita pelo Cubismo da obra de Cézanne, privilegiando aspectos dessa poética que foram relegados a segundo plano por Picasso e Braque, notadamente a percepção de um espaço em profundidade corporalmente determinado, porém conjuminando essa espacialização com a linguagem planar estabelecida pelos cubistas. Procuramos mostrar que as buscas de Morandi não tinham afinidades somente no campo das artes, mas como a produção de sua obra e as questões por ela elaboradas, particularmente como o entendimento plástico das coisas e utensílios que lhe servem como motivo para suas naturezas–mortas estão em sintonia com o conceito de coisa e coisidade tratado pxsor Heidegger em A origem da obra de arte e O que é uma coisa?, ambos os textos escritos em 1935. As indagações artísticas de Morandi, de modo mais amplo, têm profundas afinidades com o método fenomenológico de Husserl, Heidegger e Merleau-Ponty. / [en] The dissertation Morandi and the Respect for Things of Use reexamines the artistic production of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, in order to reestablish, within the time frame of the development of Modernism, his connections with contemporaneous European cultural production. The dissertation shows the ways in which Morandi s work presents itself as an alternative to Cubism s hegemonic artistic interpretation of Cézanne s work, favoring aspects of Cèzanne s poetics that Picasso and Braque relegated to the background – notably the perception of corporally determined depth of space – while at the same time uniting this spatialization with the language of flatness established by the Cubists. The dissertation seeks to demonstrate that Morandi s investigations had affinities not only in the arts, but that the production of his body of work and the questions it raised – in particular the visual understanding of things and utensils that motivated his still-lifes – were in line with the concept of thing and thingness elaborated by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art and What is a Thing? both written in 1935. Morandi s artistic inquiries, in a broad sense, have deep affinities with the phenomenological method of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio's Looking Glass is an ironic allusion to both the concave mirror and the biconvex lens. It was these simple objects, in colloquial terms a shaving mirror and a magnifying glass, which Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio, learned from Caravaggio how to use to enhance the natural phenomenon of the camera obscura effect. Painting from a projection meant that Artemisia could achieve an extreme form of realism and detail in her work. This knowledge, which was of necessity kept hidden, spooked the Inquisition and also gave artists, who knew how to manipulate the technology, an extreme competitive edge over their rivals. This dissertation challenges the naive assumptions that have been made about Artemisia's working practices, effectively ignoring the strong causal links between art and science in Seicento Italian painting. Introducing the use of optical aids by Artemisia opens up her story to a whole new generation of scholarship. / Art History / M.A. (Art history)

La présente thèse a pour point de départ une exposition florentine organisée en 1990 et intitulée « Pittura di luce ». Ses organisateurs entendaient désigner ainsi un courant de la peinture florentine du milieu du XVe siècle fondé sur la lumière et la couleur claire. Comme l’avait bien compris l’exposition, cette « peinture de lumière » est d’abord identifiable dans la « manière colorée » portée par Fra Angelico et Domenico Veneziano, mais elle doit aussi être élargie à une manière plus « blanche », qui va de Masaccio aux premières œuvres d’Andrea del Verrocchio, au début des années 1470. Les implications techniques et symboliques d’un tel style méritent également d’être étudiées car elles renforcent le sens et la cohérence d’un mouvement publiquement soutenu par les Médicis et dont l’ambition majeure fut de « faire surgir » les peintures religieuses de la pénombre des églises (I). L’étude du développement géographique vaste mais discontinu de la pittura di luce approfondit les hypothèses proposées dans le cas florentin : tout autant qu’une façon moderne et proprement « renaissante » de peindre, la « manière claire » est aussi fondée sur une lumière théologique, associée en partie à la religiosité franciscaine. Piero della Francesca est assurément le grand protagoniste de ce double rayonnement, dans les cours et dans les campagnes (II). C’est également Piero qui sera au cœur de la redécouverte d’une peinture que les XIXe et XXe siècles ont réappris à voir grâce aux historiens de l’art et aux artistes, mais également en raison du changement des conditions de vision des œuvres d’art. En ce sens, la pittura di luce constitue un chapitre important de l’histoire du regard, que l’on propose de rapprocher d’autres redécouvertes picturales elles aussi fondées sur la notion d’apparition (III). / This thesis starts from an 1990 Florentine exhibition called “Pittura di luce” which intended to identify a trend in the mid-15th-century Florentine painting. This “painting of light” is not only, as was said at the time, a “coloured style” led by Fra Angelico and Domenico Veneziano, but it should be extended to a more “white manner”, from Masaccio to the first works of Andrea del Verrocchio, in the early 1470s. The technical and symbolical meanings of this style are to be studied as they reinforce the sense and the coherence of a trend publicly sustained by the Medici. The major aim of the “pittura di luce” is to make “emerge” religious paintings from the darkness of the churches (I). The study of the vast but also discontinuous geographical development of this “bright style” amplifies the hypotheses of the Florentine case: as much as a modern way of painting, it has very often a more archaic connotation of divine light. Piero della Francesca is surely the major figure of this ambivalent development (II). He is also one of the most significant examples of the way in which the “pittura di luce” was forgotten, and then rediscovered during the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to art historians and artists, but also to the changes of the conditions of vision of the works of art. In this sense, the “pittura di luce” is an important chapter of the history of look, that we propose to compare with other rediscoveries of similar “paintings of apparition” (III).