paragone

paragone (Italian: ‘comparison’). A term referring to a long-running debate on the relative merits of painting and sculpture that was a distinctive feature of aesthetic theory in the Italian Renaissance. The foremost champion of the superiority of painting was Leonardo, who regarded it as a more intellectual art than sculpture. He wrote that ‘the sculptor's work entails greater physical effort and the painter's greater mental effort’, and he contrasted the way in which a painter could work in fine clothes whilst listening to music with the sweaty, noisy labour involved in sculpture. Partisans of sculpture praised its grandeur, its permanence, and the fact that it could show a figure in three dimensions, whereas a painting offered only two. According to Vasari, Giorgione countered the last argument by painting a picture of a naked man in which he showed ‘the front, the back, and the profile on either side’; this he did by depicting a ‘limpid pool of water’ at his feet, a mirror on one side, and a burnished breastplate on the other, thereby achieving ‘more at one single view of a living figure than does sculpture’. (The painting does not survive. Another early source describes a similar Giorgione picture of St George in armour; both accounts perhaps refer in muddled fashion to the same work.)

In 1547 the Florentine scholar Benedetto Varchi (1503–65) delivered a lecture in Florence contributing to the debate, and he asked several leading artists for their thoughts on the matter, among them Bronzino, Cellini, Michelangelo (whose funeral oration Varchi later delivered), Pontormo, and Vasari. Their replies were published in Varchi's Due lezzioni (Two Lectures) in 1549. Varchi concluded that all the arts are one, since they have the same aim, and in the second edition of his Lives (1568) Vasari resolved the question in a similar way, seeing disegno as the common foundation of architecture, painting, and sculpture. Thereafter interest in the debate waned, although echoes of it occur long afterwards, for example in Lessing's Laokoon (1766).