Filarete's Compass: Renaissance Technologies of Disegno

This is a commissioned essay arising from an invited lecture at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome as part of their conference series. It draws on research undertaken as a Major Research Fellow of the Leverhulme Trust on ‘The Mirrors of Art: Painting and Reflection in Early Modern Europe’, 2017-20. It centres on the role of draughtsman’s technologies in the theoretical conceptualisation of disegno by Renaissance art theorists, from Filarete and Brunelleschi to Zuccaro and Annibale Carracci. Beginning with fifteenth-century definitions of pictorial disegno in terms of geometrical perspective, as demonstrated by Brunelleschi’s Baptistery panel, it reframes our understanding of the historical development of Renaissance mimesis in art through the technologies of its instrumentation. Reconceptualising our longstanding definition of early Renaissance disegno, it argues that the geometer’s tools of compass, setsquare, and mirror, were the means by which technical draughtsmen effected perspectival rendering of the spatial dimensions of land and building surveyance into architectural blueprints and topographical drawing. Through extensive research on the use of mirrors in Renaissance artistic practice, it demonstrates for the first time the critical place of the mirror as an instrument of translation between three and two dimensions which informed Renaissance drawing as disegno. The article analyses the larger significance of Renaissance disegno’s specular conceit in drawing and painting, theory and practice, extending from the geometry of one-point perspective to the rise of self-portraiture. Using a widely-researched range of textual and visual sources including treatises, notebooks, prints, paintings and drawings, it charts the development of artistic theories of disegno from Alberti to Leonardo and Dürer as a mirror reflection of the visible field. It thus rewrites our long-held understanding of Renaissance art as an Albertian ‘window’ by demonstrating its conceptual and practice-based foundation in the ‘mirror’ view of a specular mimesis that would constitute painting’s fundamental paradigm until the twentieth-century advent of Abstract art.