Natural History as Model: Pliny’s Parerga and the Pictorial Arts of Fifteenth-Century Italy

A FEW YEARS AGO , faced with the prospect of teaching the graduate methods course and rehearsing, once again, the origins of the academic discipline of art history in the philosophical debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I decided to make my version of the seminar about something a little different. I reframed the course to address the situations in which art and artists became topics, for different reasons and within different discourses. Some of the alternative discourses, especially the tradition of life writing inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century, are familiar waypoints in historiographical accounts of the origins of art history. Others, including natural history in the tradition of Pliny the Elder, had, until very recently, lost their instrumental potential as ways of thinking and speaking about art and artists. While Pliny’s monumental book is a recognized source text for artistic culture, for Vasari’s life-writing project, and for the later philosophical/critical tradition founded in the writings of Kant and Hegel, its influence, as a work of world building and as a potential model for addressing the pictorial arts of Renaissance Italy, has yet to be fully explored. While architectural historians have made headway in tracing the reception of Pliny’s work within the emerging architectural practices and theories of the fifteenth