Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2020)
Dangerous disorder: ‘confusione’ in sixteenth-century Italian art treatises
Abstract
This article examines the troubled history of the word confusione as it was employed by a number of well-known art-critical and -theoretical writers of the Italian Renaissance. Beginning with De pictura, the foundational treatise of Leon Battista Alberti, this study traces the applications of the word into the late cinquecento, drawing out its various aesthetic, intellectual, psychological, and theological-devotional associations. In offering this focused study, the article proposes a wider methodological turn towards the vocabulary denoting ‘bad’ pictorial qualities as used both in the Renaissance and in art-theoretical writing at large. Such analyses, this article seeks to elucidate, can yield a wealth of information about language, taste, and ideology as disclosed by the vocabulary of art theory and criticism.
