Perspicere Deum: Nicholas of Cusa and European Art of the Fifteenth Century

This article explores the relationship between Nicholas of Cusa and the European art of his time, noting a structural link between Cusanus’s philosophy and artistic expression. There is a meaningful similarity between the iconological messages of masterpieces of Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and Michael Pacher and Cusanus’s thought. Specifically, Nicholas of Cusa and some contemporary art both expressed the idea of the relationship between a human being and God as a perspective of ego on infinity. The article offers new critical proposals: it is possible to clarify the paradoxical relationship between Nicholas of Cusa and the intellectual world of his time; we can also comprehend the real philosophical meaning of the figurative use of perspective, and the metaphysical value of Cusanus’s docta ignorantia; finally, it possible to observe an essential aspect of European Renaissance culture as a mystical-theoretical movement. Through the comparison here developed between Nicholas of Cusa and the art of his time, we understand more fully the philosophical meaning of Renaissance art, as well as essential aspects of Cusanus’s thought.