Daniel Arasse en perspective: une apostille à L’Annonciation Italienne

Abstract

This article retraces the tormented genesis of the major thesis developed by Daniel Arasse in his 1999 work The Italian Annunciation. A History of Perspective. In this book, Arasse proposes to demonstrate how mathematic perspective, for its own ambiguities, allows to better depict the mystery of the Annunciation. The historian is particularly interested in a certain kind of composition, perhaps conceived by Masaccio and later developed by painters, such as Domenico Veneziano, Fran Angelico, and Piero della Francesca, in the mid 15th-century. Here the point is to make a parallel between the Arassian “intuition” with another pictorial current, also updated recently and which implicate the same artists: that is of the “pittura di luce”. Considering the two ensembles, the affinities are so important that we could amplify Arasse’s thesis, and also give a theological sense to this “painting of light”, thought until recently only in formalist terms. Our reflection will be concluded by the exam of a limit case, that is of the Martelli Annunciation, by Filippo Lippi, and its mysterious axial disparity.