We owe more than the ideal human figure to the Italian Renaissance picture. However much we associate this period with the monumental nudes of Michelangelo (1475 –1564) or the fleshy protagonists that inhabit the canvases of Titian (1490–1576), these figures cannot exist without ground — the visual plane against which bodies appear, and, more fundamentally, the material preparation of the painting support. In the historical sweep of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, grounds register significant transitions, such as the passage from gold grounds to landscape and architectural views, and, beyond that, to the darkened grounds of baroque tenebrism or to the adoption of
Jacob Burckhardt described ground as the birthplace of “true air,”
“true landscape,” and ultimately of naturalism via linear and atmospheric perspective. I concentrate instead on how ground becomes the starting block where painting engaged with its connections with goldwork, stonework, and textile crafts—the so-called minor arts left behind in the march toward illusionism. This approach raises two major issues. I first confront how painters thought about the picture’s affiliation with craft by embracing and exploiting the double sense of ground as both visual plane and the support’s material preparation. Second, this reflection on painting’s ties with craft allowed for a conceptualization of figure-ground relations that exist in tension with perspective, the dominant paradigm unifying the space of the Renaissance picture. Ultimately, ground emerges as the site where painting claimed supremacy over the other arts through its capacity to embrace other media. Consequently, my project conceives of art in this period not exclusively in terms of a specific medium but rather as
The first chapter raises the question of how the ground can come into view, especially given that it is covered, to borrow a phrase from Leo Steinberg, in “a cloud of unlooking.” I begin by examining how art history has subsumed the ground within the paradigm of perspective and discuss how writers ranging from the American novelist Edith Wharton to art historians such as Yve-Alain Bois, Matteo Burioni, and Jeroen Stumpel raised the ground as a fundamental issue in painting. I then address how period sources developed a language for speaking about the ground, specifically through the discourse surrounding the term campo, or field. Here I read Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550/1568) against Cennino Cennini’s Libro
These observations have led me to the second chapter of “Groundwork,” which focuses on