To view the text along with the animated images, click here.

Writing on Renaissance painting in terms of cognitive science, far from reducing images to the application of faculties that were as yet unnamed, consists instead in examining how the intuition of their presence led to pictorial developments. It thus involves finding points of intersection between the artistic approach and the information and forms produced by the central nervous system, not as diagnostics of the image, but as material for its production.

In the history of painting — and the history of ideas concerning Renaissance painting — there stands out a certain parallel: one between figure and proprioception. This parallel is the topic of the present paper: to examine the connections between the representation of the human figure and the sense that produces its inner image. After briefly defining the postural sense, I’ll show how its presence gave rise to certain developments in Renaissance art.

Proprioception, or postural sense, yields a constant flow of information about the position of the body’s parts at every waking moment. Proprioceptors, which are found in muscles and around joints, provide the nervous system an inner image of the human figure by means of which it is able to anticipate and coordinate movement. Upon this figure, which originates in the muscle tissue itself, is superimposed an inner body-image that is separate from its material basis. This inner image can give rise to the phenomenon of phantom limbs: the feeling that amputated arms or legs are still attached to the body, causing at times sensations of pleasure or pain. Recent experiments have shown that it is possible to make the phantom limbs move and even to amputate them.

Even if the existence of the proprioceptive system was not established until the end of the 19th century, it was clearly already active in the past since movement without it is impossible. However, an early echo of this faculty can be found in the Aristotelian theory of the soul, whose reign extended from the Middle Ages to the 17th century. In the chapter of De Anima concerning the sense of touch, Aristotle speaks of the flesh as the intermediary, rather than the organ, of this sense, without however clarifying its nature (De Anima, 423b 25). In contrast to modern science, the Aristotelian theory does not distinguish between senses that transmit internal information, and those that transmit external information. Nevertheless, the view of the skin as an intermediary for the sense of touch treats this sense’s organ as a kind of inner figure. This lack of clarity in Aristotle’s text would undoubtedly enable one to elaborate upon the concept of the inner sentient figure; yet it is precisely on this point that modern neuroscience confirms the existence of this inner figure, not as a poetic reality, but as the anatomic sum of the body, whether immobile or in movement, just as it is transmitted by the proprioceptors to the central nervous system.

In order to better make out the role that this inner figure plays in Renaissance art and culture, one needs to consider two closely related fields: religion and the production of images.

The figure on the cross

The central figure in religion is that of Christ. Beginning in the 12th century, one notes the emergence of a Christianity that is evermore centered around the humanity of Christ and his suffering. The Franciscans, whose influence in the 16th century spread throughout Europe, prescribed an empathic piety that culminated in Francis of Assisi’s stigmatization. This episode, which served as an iconographic model, helped diffuse a model of prayer based on the postural imitation of the crucifixion, since it represented the saint in the position of one crucified. This use of posture as an expressive element is not an isolated case in the medieval context: the founder of the Dominican order wrote a treatise in which he matched seven types of prayer with seven different positions (1). Nor is it rare to encounter posture in Italian mystical texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Vanna da Orvieto, for example, would meditate upon the passions of the apostles Peter and Paul while assuming their positions at the moment of martyrdom. The mystics’ most common hope was to be privileged enough to experience all the sufferings of Christ. Now, such suffering puts into play the postural sense. Or so confirm, at least, the accounts of the Passions as disseminated by the Meditaciones vita Christi, a 13th-century text that makes up for the lack of graphic details in the Gospels by providing an overabundance of violent images aimed at fostering an empathic piety for a suffering god. The magnitude of its diffusion is shown by the more than two hundred surviving manuscripts and the fifty editions for Italy alone between 1450 and 1550.

If in order to understand the accounts of the flogging, the crowning of thorns, and the despoliation one requires an external tactile experience of being scratched, stung, or cut, then the description of the nailing on the cross is incomprehensible without the experience of proprioception. The author of Meditaciones describes the episode by presenting two possibilities: in the first, he assumes that the cross is already erected; in the second he supposes that it is on the ground and credits the executioners with a certain sense of symmetry. After having nailed the first arm they must pull the other one to the opposite side of the cross using ropes. In either case, it is above all a question of imagining a human figure stretched upon a cruciform frame. Christ’s posture, the empathy with his figure, is in some way the expression of the violent infliction of the geometric symbol of the cross upon postural sensation.

Human figures in flesh and bone

Since this theme circulated throughout Europe by way of the Meditaciones, it is likely that it determined the perception of the most common object, image and support of prayer in the West—the crucifix. The theme of the crucifixion appears in Flemish iconographic painting, which readily emphasizes the none too burlesque efforts of the executioners. In Italian painting, on the other hand, such depictions are rare, despite the diffusion of the Meditaciones in the Italic peninsula (1,2,3).

A similar three-dimensional imagination of the human figure is also found in artistic training techniques of the 15th century; i.e. techniques used for imagining a figure in order to depict it. In Della Pittura, the humanist Leon Battista Alberti (1438) proposed a technique that requires one to imagine a human figure starting from its skeleton, gradually adding layers to it: bones, muscles, skin, robes. His influence held sway up until the 19th century. A number of Renaissance artists also recommended its use: Leonardo, Vasari, Paolo Pino, Francesco de Hollanda, Cellini, Danti, Allori, Armenini and Lomazzo. A drawing by Alessandro Allori provides an instructive example, which one sees put to use in Michelangelo and Raphael (4,5,6). One also finds traces of it in Ascanio Condivi’s description of Michelangelo’s Moses:

"A marvelous work and full of art, but much more: beneath the beautiful robes covering [Moses], appears the nude, and the clothing in no way detracts from the beauty of the body; one sees this in all of [Michelangelo’s] clothed figures, both painted and sculpted."

Whereas in thinking about the body one imagines its movements and the emotions it expresses within a narrative context, in the visual arts the body becomes the raw material for the image, deprived of any specific narrative function. It is exactly in this context that Raphael animates Michelangelo’s David (8). In a sketch for the Massacre of the Innocents, he studied the positions of the soldiers’ moving bodies, without apparently worrying about how to represent the horror of babies being killed. In fact, Renaissance painters and their public considered the human figure not only as the principal element in pictorial composition, but also as the focal point for the expression and appreciation of artistic talent. Following this line of thought, the Venetian painter Paolo Pino in the Dialogo di Pittura (1548) advises his colleagues to include in their narrative composition "...at least one wholly mysterious figure, that is forced and difficult, in order to be recognized as a good painter by those who understand the perfection of this art."

One comes across these views once again in the 16th century debate that set sculptors against painters: sculptors insisted that a carved figure required greater intellectual work than a painted figure, since one needed to conceive its appearance from a number of different angles, while a painting is visible from only a single angle. Painters responded that a good painter could show in a single glance all the positions that a human figure can assume. One finds here the same idea of Ascanio Condivi, a close friend and the first biographer of Michelangelo, according to whom the Last Judgment reveals all that nature can do with the human body. During this same period, the artistic training techniques prescribed by Vasari opened up the possibility of superimposing the mental and postural images:

"... the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise, the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, and the bone underneath. Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position can be drawn by help of the imagination without one’s having the living forms in view."

Since the artist has within himself the anatomical body-image, it is likely that the artist’s relation to posture goes beyond memory and extends to his own experience. One finds an example of this in Palma Giovane’s self-portrait, whose position is inscribed as just one other variation on the poses of the figures depicted within the work being painted (10). A particularly playful poem by the painter Agnolo Bronzino perhaps confirms this superposition between the painter’s postural figure and the painted figure. The poem is from the Capitolo del pennello, a burlesque fantasy about the brush’s role as a generative organ for both the painting and painter, and which makes possible the superposition of the one thousand and one figural poses onto the one thousand and one sexual positions. Bronzino’s text begins by extolling an imaginary painting:

"Recently I saw a beautiful depiction of a man and a woman: they were nude painted together in a pleasant (piacevole) act."

The ostensible motivation for the poem is an obviously unimportant painting of two figures — Adam and Eve, Atlas and Hesperis, Venus and Adonis, Anthony and Cleopatra....Bronzino simply notes that the work contains all that one can acquire through study or by nature, and decides to write a piece in praise of the brush that produced it.

"This one is shown on the bed or assumes a tired pose, erect or seated; this one holds something in his hand, that one hides it this one wants to be seen behind someone; that one wants to be painted in front of someone; this one stands, that one seems to fall. I couldn’t count the thousand and one acts and extravagant ways; know that variety pleases everyone. It’s enough to do it facing or from behind, sideways, foreshortened or in perspective, the brush adapts to every position."

The visual source of Bronzino’s postural fantasy has been identified: the Modi, a series of engravings made in the 1520s by Giulio Romano and etched by Marcantonio Raimondi (9). A Renaissance Kama-Sutra, their pornographic character, suggesting a proprioceptive fantasy involving intertwined bodies, makes it impossible to forget that it was made during a time in which the figure was the principal element in painting, and that it is part of the same tradition of figural experimentation that includes Michelangelo’s preparatory studies for the Last Judgment (11). Nevertheless, the pornographic character of the Modi also serves to remind us that it functions only from the moment in which the observer projects his own tactile and postural experience into the image.

Whether the figure expressed the states of the soul or positions of desire, the task of depicting it seemed to have become an end in itself, indifferent to the narrative function of the religious image. In 1435 Alberti had already criticized, with Donatello in mind, artists who gave their figures highly unnatural poses. These criticisms resurfaced in the 16th century and constitute one of the leitmotivs of the Dialogo degli errori e degli abusi de’pittori circa l’istorie (Camerino 1564) by Giovan Andrea Gilio:

"When Modern painters have to execute some work their first concern is to twist the head, arms and legs of their figures so that it can be said that they are contorted, and these contortions are often such that it would be far better if they were absent and they have little or nothing to do with the subject of the story."

Gilio’s worries are framed in the debate over the role of the image, which opposed Catholics to Protestants. These worries centered on the increasing indifference among painters towards the subject’s narrative and sensory constraints, thus endangering the didactic function of religious images. Loyal to medieval mental imagery, he declares:

"In order to show the strength of their art, painters would do better to depict Christ suffering, bleeding, covered in spit, flayed, deformed, ugly and pale to the point of no longer having human form..."

And he adds:

"I often discussed this point with painters. They all responded to me in the same way, saying that [such depictions] would go against the conventions of their art."

We don’t know which artists Gilio refers to, but their views confirm the painters’ liberation from, if not their indifference to, the constraints of the subject. They also confirm the reluctance of depicting the sensory violence conveyed by the medieval imagery in meditation handbooks. The body-image, as one learned to represent it in bone, muscle, flesh, and robes, is superimposed on the inner sense of posture which is at once an experience of the real, a personal structure of the visible figure, and a product of proprioception. In the realm of art the latter doesn’t serve as a scientific explanation of the image, but as the raw material that is unbound by the constraints and limits of anatomy.