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8. A Brief Report on the Painting of Three Haloed Figures
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Il Kim . Preaching in his episcopal see of Brixen on the feast of All Saints in 1456, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa confirmed the pivotal importance of painting to his understanding of reality: Consider then a painter who, when he wants to depict something, e.g., a narrative of some sort, intuits the very concept of painting the thing and fashions a picture in the likeness of the idea that he intuits within himself. But until the intellect undertakes to depict the art of painting, it could depict nothing that can be painted according to any particular fashion, not the heavens, the earth, an animal, nor any other visible thing. Rather, [the intellect “paints”] an intellectual nature that is merely capable of art and can impress the principles of the pictorial art in itself so that there arises an image of the form of the pictorial art (forma artis pictoriae ) as well as the form of the form of all things (species specierum omnium) that can be sensibly depicted.1 The act of painting provides a concrete image of a highly creative intellectual process that cannot, however, be depicted in images. Painting an image is a concrete expression of the foundational creativity within the pictorially barren but still fruitful chamber of the intellect. This sheer wonder in the face all creativity penetrates the core of Cusan thinking and, above all, thinking of the absolute. The analogy of the painter even 143 1. Sermo CCLI, Codex Vaticanus latinus 1245, fol. 188va–188vb: “Et considera consequenter quod pictor dum vult aliquid depingere puta historia aliquam, intuetur in conceptum rei pingendae et facit picturam ad similtudinem ideae, quam in se intuetur. Sed dum intellectus artem pingendi depingere institueret, tunc nihil quod pingi potest particulariter depingeret, quia non caelum, non terram, non animal, nec alliud visibile, sed intellectualem naturam, quae solum artis est capax, et artis pictoriae principia in ipsa imprimeret, ut fieret imago formae artis pictoriae et species specierum omnium quae sensibiliter possent depingi,” as cited in M.-A. Aris, “‘Praegnans affirmatio’ Gotteserkenntnis als Ästhetik des Nichtsichtbaren bei Nikolaus von Kues,” Theologische Quartalschrift 181 (2002): 107, n. 43. leads to a Cusan notion of reality that M.-A. Aris calls “the knowledge of God as an aesthetics of the invisible.”2 No philosopher who took so seriously the intellectual content of images and of painting deserves to be studied from within the history of art except also in terms of the rigor of art criticism. In other words, it would not do justice to the intellectual caste of Nicholas’s own theory of painting to conclude precipitously and without further comment the discussion of his place in the history of art. The point of this essay is far more modest than the elaboration of a Cusan basis for a principle of art criticism . Rather, we turn to a critical examination of the painting mentioned in the previous essay that has in recent scholarship been closely associated with the figure of Nicholas of Cusa. The painting of three haloed figures [Fig. 1] had been unknown to most art historians until the German philologist Wolfgang Speyer published an article entitled “Die drei monotheistischen Weltreligionen in Gespräch: Zu einem unbekannten Bild des Quattrocento” in 1992, asserting that the painting was created in the fifteenth century and that it exemplified Cusanus’s sympathetic attitude toward the Qur’an.3 As far as I know, no other article on the painting has been published. This article is a report based on my observation of the original painting that I conducted in January 2003 in Sassoferrato. The painting measures 131cm by 85cm. Drawn on canvas in oil by an unknown artist in middle Italy, it is today kept in the Franciscan convent of Santa Maria della Pace, a religious house founded in 1502 on the outskirts of Sassoferrato near Urbino. According to Father P. Stefano Trojani of the convent, no one living can clearly understand the meaning of the painting, and there is nothing about the painting’s provenance on record. It is not known, therefore, for what purpose the painting was created and how long it has hung on these walls. 144 Il Kim 2. M.-A. Aris, “‘Praegnans affirmatio’ Gotteserkentnis als Ästhetik des Nichtsichtbaren bei Nikolaus von Kues,” Theologische Quartalschrift 181 (2002): 97–111. On the general topic of Cusanus’s aesthetics, see the Introduction (and especially the sources cited in notes 7 and 32), as well as the contributions of K. Harries and W. Dupré, to...