Definition of "pictura" [pic•tu•ra]

• A pattern of coloration. (noun)

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• "The historical interdependence of linguistic and visual figures, articulated in Horace's Art of Poetry, thrives in Alberti's definition of istoria in De pictura and in Castiglione's self-deprecating description of the Book of the Courtier as a "picture" by a "humble painter" (from the dedicatory letter to Lord Dom Miguel de Silva, bishop of Viseu)."
• "Note 13: In the first passage of De pictura, Alberti borrows a Ciceronian proverb (from De amicitia 5.16) concerning the "coarse senses of Minerva" to distinguish the sensate knowledge of a painter from a mathematician's abstract mensurations (see Kemp, "Introduction," 12)."
• "In De pictura, Alberti is as concerned with what should be depicted in a work, its subject or historia, as with its instrumental execution."