Biography

Baptiste Tochon-Danguy is a former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, and a former postdoctoral researcher at the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome. His thesis, entitled Il furore dell’arte: Sculpture et métaphysique du mouvement de Jacopo della Quercia à Giambologna, was defended at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris) and is currently under publication. His work focuses on Renaissance philosophy and art theory, the interpretation of Italian sculpture from Donatello to Michelangelo, and the reception of theoretical problems formulated during the Renaissance in twentieth-century art discourse.

Project Summary

In his treatise On the Art of Building, Alberti asserted that a building, like any other body, can be divided into its form and contours (referred to as “lineamenta”) and its “materia”. The form is the result of thought, while the matter arises from nature. However, raw materials, before they can be “conformed” to the desired shape, must undergo “preparation and selection”, which includes considerations of shape, colour, physical attributes, and of the contextual appropriateness to the site and intended purpose of the building. This commitment to the material aspect of artistic creation was developed by later theoreticians of arts, from Doni’s claim that the sculptor must find “the matter disposed to introduce the figure in it” to Zuccari’s considerations on the knowledge of matter. Thus, far from leading to the neglect of technical and material concerns, the use of hylomorphism in Renaissance art theory implies that the artist’s thought, however inventive, must correspond to the potentialities of a matter that has already been transformed. Drawing on the Scholastic and Dantesque concept of prepared or disposed matter in Renaissance philosophy and art theory, this project aims to provide a new theoretical framework for interpreting Renaissance art in its making, including a detailed study of the reception of Scholastic hylomorphism within both Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophies of the Renaissance, as well as an analysis of its revival in early modern art theory.