Manetti biography brunelleschi pazzin

Author: Amanda Lillie

1. Introduction

In his ‘Life of Brunelleschi’ Antonio di Tuccio Manetti provided the only 15th-century description of two painted panels by Brunelleschi showing perspectival representations of the Florentine Baptistery and the Piazza Signoria.¹ In this key account of the mathematical construction of pictorial space, the word space (‘spazio’) never occurs.

Instead, a set of key terms alerts us, on the one hand, to the linked concepts of ‘regola’, ‘misura’ and ‘ragione’ (the systematic application of scale, measurement and proportion that establish the mathematical and theoretical framework of perspective), and on the other hand to the notion of the image as a ‘portrait’ (‘ritratto’) of the ‘place’ (‘luogo’).² This activity of portrait making is emphasised by the use of phrases such as truth (‘proprio vero’) and testimony (‘possone rendere testimonanza’).

Real