Anti-clericalism, scepticism, agnosticism, atheism

The mathematician’s perfect objects and actions –lines, planes, bisectings etc.- existed only in the realm of reason.  In the material world, they had to acquire a grossness.  Was the world then to be disparaged for its platonic imperfection?  Alberti, as has been seen and as will be seen, would have none of it.  The objects might lose much of their beauty, but they acquired a usefulness and they retained a power to intimate perfection.  At the same time, there were other things belonging to mental life that, like the mathematician’s stock-in-trade, possessed the perfection of certitude.  Faith and belief held them in view – and were under no obligation to set themthemselves against a worldly measure of veracity.  Alberti had the notion of applied maths: he also thought about an applied religion.  By contrast with self-justifying religion, a tested faith and a scrutinized belief, abjuring absolute value, would confess belief as a matter of degree.  Whilst much reduced in authority, it would find a companion.  If Minerva would have a more corporeal sister, religion could share her world.  The object of faith and belief already invited qualified commitment, when it was a thing made flesh.  However, such a view of religion could face the charge of being unorthodox.

As a literary personality, Alberti is elusive and changeable.  His fascination with the human ability and propensity to dissemble – so that our knowledge and ignorance of others are of their making rather than ours – has been much remarked upon.[i] He himself invented several guises for his autobiographical self in his various literary fictions.[ii]  The voice heard in his treatises is not certainly always his own.  Of course, it is not necessarily so that the personalities that he presented, though various, are incompatible.  It is difficult, nonetheless, to leech out, from the cameleon and composite character that emerges from a broader survey of his writings, Alberti’s own firm beliefs.  In the complication of personality is a mass of perhaps evasive and possibly ironic literary utterance; and in this way, seeds of doubt were perhaps deliberately planted, for his own diversion, or, where his ideas were controversial, we may suppose for his safety.

Nevertheless, despite the apparent inconstancy, an extensive overview of his writings comes upon reiterations: these acquire a prominence and tend to confirm one another as points of true belief, rather than standing as repeated but independent acts of evasion.

It is perhaps surprising that Alberti’s evasiveness should be evident where Church and religion are concerned.  Precisely there, untroubled faith and stolid othodoxy would be expected.  Alberti was a papal civil servant; he had taken minor orders, he enjoyed ecclesiastical benefices, and a major part of his activity as an architect was in connection with church buildings.  Yet, soon enough are to be discovered in his writings, beneath a veneer of piety and behind perhaps a rhetorical façade of support for the institution of the Church as she operated in the fifteenth century, doubt and criticism.  In his more or less covert expression of heterodox views, Alberti must, of course, have been passing winks and nods at a like-minded readership.  It was perhaps caution that left the dedicatee of his fabulous and scabrous tale, Momus, addressed in the preface, anonymous.  The suggestion may be, then, that at the very heart of the institution there was disaffection and even heresy.  Poggio  and Valla and Lapo da Castilionchio were famously less circumspect; and there were many voices calling for reform.

However, Alberti did not always hide his criticism.  A ringing note of religious scepticism and anti-clericalism is frequently struck in his writings.  Specific current religious practices and the mores of the clergy receive denunciation.  Of course, the critical attitude alone does not indicate a desire for more than a piecemeal addressing of complaints; the reform implicitly called for is not necessarily radical.  Nevertheless, the path is opened to a question of altogether greater importance: did Alberti’s thinking diverge from Christian doctrine in regard to piety and the role of the clergy? –and if so, on what points and to what degree?  Was there Truth in the Christian religion and virtue in the institution? As will be seen, the depth and comprehensiveness of his scepticism and anti-clericalism are surprising: and the delimited character of the Christian belief that emerges as a result is perhaps indicative of his perilous alienation within the Church.  Needless to say in the circumstances, Alberti’s more serious criticisms and doubts seldom received other than oblique expression.  The uncovering of his true thoughts involves some reading-between-the-lines.[iii]

If Alberti were designing a vehicle in which to ferry his concealed thoughts, it is difficult to imagine one better-equipped for the purpose than Momus.  Written around 1450, Momus is one of his most elaborately evasive works.  So full of incident integral to plot is it that the story is very difficult to précis.  What can be said is that it is a complicated satirical narrative containing allegory and fable and telling of the tribulations of Jupiter and the gods.[iv]  Insofar as Jupiter stands for the supreme ruler or the supreme being is Alberti’s view of clergy or religion his theme.

It is a ferocious satire on the doctine of an immanent God.  The gods of Olympus are so selfish, gullible and ineffectual that they may as well be uninterested, like the gods of Epicurus.  As designer and ruler of a flawed and troublesome world, with a venal and squabbling pantheon about him, Jupiter considers the option of destroying his first effort and starting over again; building a new world.  The advice of the gods and of the world’s philosophers is sought; but no satisfactory plan of action emerges.  Instead, through a series of misadventures arising from the vanity of the gods and their need for praise from humankind, the world declines into an even more catastrophic condition. 

A prime mover at every stage has been the eponymous anti-hero, Momus.  As well as an actor in the drama –and complicating the reader’s task enormously– he is a principle  that operates in the universe and as a voice within the individual.  He is strife in the one and bitterness in the other.  We recognize him at large and in ourselves.  In the person of the god (for some of the time) whose essence is ire and perversity, is presented by Alberti a character whose words we cannot accept at face value; for he now is unrestrained asperity and now, apparently, is sweet candour.[v]  He either expresses unbelieveable truths or acceptable falsehoods (indeed, he consciously moves from the one rhetoric to the other from Book I to Book II).  He represents a challenge to the reader, who must sift out single-tongued from forked-tongued statements. [vi] Alberti constructs fire-walls between himself and the voices within the text, and the result is that his own voice just cannot be located.  First, there is Momus – by his duplicitous nature, not necessarily to be identified with Alberti.  Then, Momus – at first a sufferer from Tourette’s Syndrome (if the anachronism of terminology be allowed) and then the witness with mastery of deceit– himself reports speeches made by others; his unreliability is an essential part of his character, and belief is at sea outside and within the text itself.  The authorial voice also inhabits many of the other participants in the narrative.  Alberti’s famous personal device, the winged eye, seems particularly well-adapted to navigate this complicated universe, for Momus is like Mercury’s naughty brother, flying between the realms of men and gods, not to communicate but to meddle in the affairs of both, and to infect them with the worm of doubt and to plant in them the seed of dissention.

Near the beginning of the story, Jupiter sends the goddess Virtue down to Earth, with her children as retinue: Triumph and Trophy (the boys) and Praise and Posterity (the girls).  Their task is to undo the damage wrought by Momus, who has been arguing atheism too persuasively among mortals.  Alberti’s description of Virtue’s progress and reception is striking for its abandonment of the ironic tone that is otherwise so prevalent in the fable:

It is truly marvellous to relate how the whole surface of the earth exulted with joy and praise when the goddess first set foot on land.  Never mind how exhilarated the breezes, the springs, the streams and hills became at the approach of the goddess!  You could see flowers bursting out of even the roughest flint, smiling far and wide at the goddess as she went by, bending down to do her homage, and breathing out every fragrance to fill her path with sweet odours.  You would have seen melodious birds flying around her applauding with painted wings and greeting the visiting gods with their song.[vii]

The scene that Alberti describes here –the world where Virtue prevails– is also striking because it is very like other scenes depicted by him on other occasions.  The passage is very similar in content and tone to the speech of Theogenio near the end of the dialogue of that name:

Oh, my dear Microtiro, how greatly was sweet friendship ever to be prized! […] But, if it would please you, let us sit here among these myrtles – this place no less delightful than your vast theatres and most sumptuous temples.  Here, raised by nature, columns as numerous as the loftiest trees that you see around.  Above us, the sun, – we, shaded most delightfully by these beech trees and firs; and all around us, at every turn, you see the thousand exquisite colours of the flowers in their profusion, woven into the vivid green of the shadows, more intense more limpid than the sky; and to please you, the most ravishing fragrances.  And then, the joyful celebration of the little birds that throng about you in their brightest and richest plumage – who could not take delight?  So beautiful they are as, again and again, they come to greet me with their fresh songs raised to the heavens.[viii]

Connections are next to be drawn between these passages and that where Florence Cathedral is described by Agnolo Pandolfini in the dialogue, Profugiorum ab aerumna:

And certainly this temple has in itself grace and majesty; and, as I have often thought, I delight to see joined together here a charming slenderness with a robust and full solidity so that, on the one hand, each of its parts seems designed for pleasure, while, on the other, one understands that it has all been built for perpetuity.  I would add that here is the constant home of temperateness, as of springtime: outside, wind, ice and frost; here inside one is protected from the wind, here mild air and quiet.  Outside, the heat of summer and autumn; inside, coolness.  And if, as they say, delight is felt when our senses perceive what, and how much, they require by nature, who could hesitate to call the temple the nest of delights?  Here, wherever you look, you see the expression of happiness and gaiety; here it is always fragrant; and, that which I prize above all, here you listen to the voices during mass, during that which the ancients called the mysteries, with their marvelous beauty.[ix]

The church evokes the delights of Spring.  Nature, Virtue and the season of birth are entwined here in the church of Santa Maria del Fiore.  The Madonna, as the presiding spirit, is Venus’s Christian cousin; and it is possible to catch, in Alberti’s description, something of the atmosphere of Botticelli’s later Primavera –it, too, a pointed-arched place.  Theogenius invited his friend to sit in a myrtle bower; the tree sacred to Venus.  In the passages cited, the senses are similarly charmed one by one, with the ear, in each case, the last to be ravished.  Lionardo Alberti, in De familia lists the delights of the villa in the same order: ‘Alla primavera la villa ti dona infiniti sollazzi, verzure, fiori, odori, canti; sforzasi in piu modi farti lieto, tutta ti ride e ti promette grandissima ricolta, émpieti di buona speranza e di piaceri assai.’[x]

The passages also concur, very clearly, with one that stands prominently within De familia.  It is Lionardo Alberti’s statement of his creed.  Lionardo is the most philosophical interlocutor.  In the dialogue, humour is to be found, but not irony; and the reader does not seek ambiguity in what Lionardo says:

Most of all I praise the true and wise teachers who tell us that man was created for the pleasure of God, to recognise the primary and original source of things amid all the variety, dissimilarity, beauty and multiplicity of animal life, amid all the forms, structures, coverings and colors that characterise the animals.  He was made to praise God together with universal nature, seeing in every living thing such great and perfectly matched harmonies of voice and verse and music combined in concord and loveliness.[xi]

The praise, put directly into the terms of religious practice, in the first of Alberti’s Psalmi precationum repeats the theme of Nature:

Laudate pueri Dominum; laudate Dominum omnes gentes.

Laudate Dominum cantu aves; laudet [?] Dominum omnis musica.

Plaudite aurae aestivae et frondes; plaudite rivi purissimi Domino,

Arrideat Domino aurora et lux; flores et gemmae arrideant Domino. [xii]

When these five texts are gathered together, it is possible to see that the straightforward allegory of the Momus passage becomes embedded in the ostensibly naturalistic description of Nature in Teogenio, and in the simile of the Cathedral and Spring, in Profugiorum.  The statement recurs in very abbreviated form in De re aedificatoria, Book VI, Chapter 2: ‘ Deos certe spectato caelo et mirificis eorum operibus miramur magis, quod pulchra illa quidem videmus, quam quod esse utillima sentiamus. Aut quid ista prosequar? Ipsa rerum, quod natura, quod passim licet, nimia pulchritudinum voluptate sublascivire in dies desistit, omitto caetera, et pingendis floribus.’[xiii] The tone is, very broadly, Petrarchan.  All contain a confession of faith when they are recognised as agreeing, in substance, with what Lionardo Alberti says, without varnish, in De familia.  There is a distinct order by which humankind might approach God, and the gap between God and Man remains.  Lionardo’s point is stated in similar terms in De iciarchia: ‘Nacque l’omo per essere utile a sé, e non meno agli altri. La prima e propria utilità nostra sarà adoperare le forze dell’animo nostro a virtù, a riconoscere le ragioni e ordine delle cose, e indi a venerare e temere Dio.’[xiv] He could not state the proper order of things more clearly.  The gist of the argument is repeated: ‘Dio ama, aiuta, accresce quelli che studiano simigliarsi a Lui con quello che a lui sia concesso.’[xv]  The gift that human beings must use to assimilate themselves to God is that quality whereby they are by etymological definition humans, virtù.  God, of course, has perfect goodness, but does not – except in the form of Christ – have virtù.  It is in this way that, for Alberti, virtù, Nature and honouring the Creator are undisentanglable principles.  Alberti’s general view is that these combine in the circumstances where dissimulation is absent.  An almost pre-lapsarian condition is possible where virtue and naturalness prevail; it is one of candour, in amicizia.  In Alberti’s larger thinking, amicizia stands in opposition not to enmity, but to dissimulation and falsehood.[xvi]

At last, it is clear that Alberti is advancing a version of the Argument from Design.  Lionardo is stating with absolute directness that the fullest appreciation of Creation itself is a sufficient knowledge of God.[xvii]  More is not to be trusted.  In a somewhat Augustinian spirit, he advises against supposing that human beings can be privy to the thought of God.  Such presumption is either ill-mannered or erroneous.  In the Intercenale, ‘Convelata’, he says, “I interpret the saying ’Don’t wear God’s image on your ring’ to mean that we must speak sparingly of divine matters.”[xviii]  Ignorance is to be the human condition, in the Intercenale, ‘Fatum et Fortuna’: “…Desine, inquiunt (ie. the shades, which act as interlocutor in the dialogue), homo, istiusmodi dei deorum occulta investigare longius quam mortalibus liceat…”[xix] In Apologo LIV, he delivers the same message: “Puer, quom radios solis amplexibus prehendere nequisset, obcludere inter volas manus eos elaborabat.  Inquit umbra: ‘Desine inepte, nam res divinae carcere mortali nusquam detinentur.’” A boy, unable to gather the rays of the sun in his arms, tried to catch them in his cupped hand.  Said shadow, ‘Desist, fool, for divine things can never be imprisoned in a mortal cell.’[xx]  The idea of which Alberti is a voice here is the very soul of the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael and of a sentiment crucial to the concept of Renaissance itself.  It is docta ignorantia.[xxi]  What else is the recognition of the Magi in Leonardo’s Adoration, in the Uffizi?  The Child in Nature is the wonderment.  Love, as Raphael understood too, in his Madonnas, sees more clearly than wisdom.  The repetition of the idea, through the broad extent of simile in these crucial passages, indicates that Alberti –not here the ironist– means what he says.  So, it is justified to maintain that these four passages (and the psalm) contain Alberti’s basic religious philosophy.  And what emerges is a reductive sort of theology.  Repeated is a praise of Nature and, when Alberti’s insistent tone is recognized, an implicit dispraise of beauties and virtues claimed to be discovered in Supernature.  There is an implicit dispraise because orthodoxy’s claims were the more familiar.  Where Alberti’s attention to nature is not insistent it is habitual.  A telling instance of preference of this sort is in Book II of De familia.  Lionardo is considering the importance of marriage.  To hand was an obvious recommendation of it: Christ’s actions at the Marriage at Cana.  But Lionardo looks elsewhere: ‘Cosi adunque fu il coniugio instituito dalla natura ottima e divina maestra di tutte le cose…’[xxii]

Rejection of naturalism becomes a cautionary tale, as Alberti imitates the brevity of Aesop in the Intercenale, ‘Gallus’.  To paraphrase a little, the cock in the coop notes that the farmer is fattening the poultry for the pot.  He resolves to refuse the grain that is abundantly supplied to them, thinking that he will avoid the pot through being thin.  The farmer takes his emaciated condition as a possible sign of disease and throws him out of the coop, where he is caught and eaten by a hungry wolf.  The cock’s mistake is to contruct a theory of the motivation of the farmer –the actor on the outside of his universe– while being unable to foretell all the possible responses he might make to finding the starved bird in the coop.  In the interim, the cock has foregone the food that would have made his life satisfactory within the coop.[Marsh, p.40]  So, for humankind in the bountiful state of nature.

[Time, place and circumstance are to be acknowledged.  He says, in Book II of De iciarchia. ‘… ‘e per questo saranno qui e’pensieri nostri per sua natura piu da chiamarli consultazione per intendere e assequire il meglio, che da iudicarli instituto determinato e quasi posto come segno certo, immobile, dove ogni nostro desiderio s’adirizzi.’[p.6 elec.]  There is a tone of scepticism here.  Principle, that would predetermine action –certain and unmoved– seems like a kind of moral catalepsy.]

From naturalism to scepticism

The tone is dialectical in Lionardo Alberti’s statement.  Its subversiveness is concealed but discoverable if it is considered in relation to the other passages.  Alberti seems to  articulate the point, or something similar to it, early on in Momus.  In Book I, Momus, his blasphemy against Jupiter’s authority having left him exposed to the justice of a divine tribunal, has escaped to earth from heaven and has revenged himself by denying, before mortals, the gods’ existence.  The philosophers of the world, Momus says, had put up various arguments in favour of the existence of God, and Momus had, one by one, refuted them.  Momus, the sophist, can of course (within the fiction) argue effectively against reality.  There was, however, difference of opinion among the philosophers: ‘Still others maintained that the force infusing everything, which moved the universe and whose rays, as it were, were human souls, must be thought of as God.’[xxiii]  This somewhat pantheistic and possibly outrageously heretical argument –it brings to mind Spinoza and his fate later on– is broadly in agreement with that contained in the passages quoted above.[xxiv]   When nature acquires divinity –is divina maestra– we are also part of her, and affirming nature’s goodness is acting out God’s purpose.  This position has, in common with what seems to have been Alberti’s own, a philosophical scepticism –an insistence upon the primacy of sense-data and the merely imputed existence and character of God (the passage fails to end in the indicative voice).   Alberti cautions elsewhere, as we have seen, upon the inadvisability of presuming to enquire too closely into God’s purposes.[xxv] That is the drift of his observation in De Pictura that, ‘The painter seeks to imitate only that which is visible.’[xxvi] The Latin –’Nam ea solum imitari studet pictor quae sub luce videantur’– could be translated as, ‘For the painter applies himself to the imitation only of those things which are visible in (natural) light.’  The argument is that there are things which it is not the business to the painter to represent, namely things that are not sub luce.  Alberti’s preference is for empiricism over speculation.  He is of the same mind in another context, when he states that the art of medicine was created by a thousand men in a thousand years.[xxvii] He is, in effect, rehearsing an argument made by Cornelius Celsus in the prologue to his De Medicina.[xxviii]  The first-century writer contrasts the speculative and empirical schools of medicine.  The former investigate causes, whilst the latter establish practice upon the accumulated knowledge of effective remedies.  It is only the latter which grows in a regular way through time, and Alberti is excluding the former.

Tellingly, in De re aedificatoria, Alberti speculates upon the nature of the Divinity and discusses what material would be best for God’s representation.  His choice of the quality that the material should epitomise is durability.  It is in a deliberate act of gnostic self-denial  –of scepticism– that Alberti limits himself to perpetuity as God’s defining characteristic as far as humankind is concerned.[xxix]  It is not a characteristic that promises any communication between God and Man.  God’s perpetuity being the unarguable core of His definition, Man’s mortality acquires a tragic centrality in his own definition.  It is difficult to see, in the light of this characterisation of God, from where Man is to derive Eternal Life: to have perpetuity himself.

            Alberti continues to describe reactions to the appearance of the goddess Virtue in Momus: ‘the eyes of all mortals were riveted, staring at the very faces of the gods.’ [xxx]  He is insisting that the goddess is recognisable by all.  The sight of Virtue produces an effect similar to that of the historia in De Pictura which people could appreciate irrespective of the level of their learning.[xxxi]  There might be the thought in Momus that the ignorant, habitually reclining in a vegetable state, are capable of no mental response other than to be thunderstruck.  If so, it is a cynic’s bitterness that turns praise to disdain upon a sixpence. [the point isn’t clear -clarify] ‘Matrons, young women, old men, people of every age, rushed…’.[xxxii]  These  might seem to be gullible, the frivolous, the disappointed –and the mindless mass. [?]

            In Book IV of Momus, Stupor makes his appearance –the god of the thunderstruck.  He serves as another of Mercury’s counterparts, here communicating Jupiter’s existence and character (rather than thought and purpose) to the dull-witted among us.  The joke is a good one.  On this occasion, it is extended, for, as Mercury carries messages in both directions, so does Stupor.  It is the gods themselves who are dumbfounded by the ostentation of the humans’ spectacle, as the latter attempt to placate them by building the richest and most magnificent structure in which to perform their act of praise and supplication.  The gods themselves opt to live in the passive voice under the reign of Stupor and are rendered incapable of action as they decide that the best way to observe the gratifying spectacle is to turn themselves into an audience by disguising themselves as statues.  The passage in De re aedificatoria, where the visitor to the rich church exclaims that it is worthy of God –the reverse case of what we have at this point in Momus– comes to mind.[xxxiii] In light of it, the joke is very wry: that ‘Jupiter particularly admired the innumerable large columns of Parian marble [in the theatre] –pieces carved from great mountains, a gigantic labor.  The columns were so numerous and so vast that he was at a loss to imagine how they had been dragged there and erected.’[xxxiv]  The builders of the portico of the Pantheon no doubt intended to confound the Roman mob and any barbarian in just this way.

Alberti discusses the use of statues in De re aedificatoria, Book VII, Chapter 17.  His essential and familiar point is that, whilst the statue of the god is present, the god himself is not: ‘…we would argue that no one could be so misguided as to fail to realize that the gods should be visualized in the mind, and not with the eyes.’[xxxv]  On that basis, some would exclude all statuary.  Some would use it to control the gullible (those with senses and without thought).  Alberti himself would have statues in poses consistent with their characters.  In other words, suspension of disbelief remains within the power of the observer.  The assertion that the rich church is worthy of God is ridiculous, for the reader is surely to recognise the folly of a presumptuousness that supposes humankind capable of anything less than contemptible compared with God’s works.[xxxvi]  The reader is to be alert to Alberti’s irony.  He makes the same point about the gullible construing the existence of God from the magnificence of humans’ works (and in doing so, parts from Nicholas V’s deathbed argument reported by Giannozzo Manetti in favour of a church architecture that maintains the faith of the unlearned by its grandeur) in De pictura/Della pittura, para. 25.  Painting is able to show the gods to the faithful, establish a link between them and fill their minds with religion.[xxxvii] Alberti goes on directly to cite the case of Phidias’s picture of Jupiter at Aulis which confirmed people in la ora presa religione /receptae religioni. The awe of the faithful, he makes clear, is unconnected with the truth of the religion.  Florence Cathedral’s power to stimulate Angolo Pandolfini’s senses is no measure of its power to impress God.  A sense of the measure of the gulf between Man and God is more baldly indicated in the passage in Theogenius where he wrote, ‘Licurgus, it is said, made a statute at Sparta to the effect that sacrifices to the gods should not be sumptuous nor such that they could not be performed every day.’  There was a corollary: ‘And one should not make offerings to princes of things valued by stupid and low-born people…’[xxxviii]  The vulgar and gaudy gift is as valueless to the noble-minded as the rich church is to God.

The foregoing discussion introduces the theme of scepticism, because Alberti is to be found casting doubt, implicity, upon the importance of educational and social caste, where certain kinds of experience are concerned.  The proposition that the learned are categorically distinct from the unlearned is, of course, unsustainable.  Where, after all, does learnedness begin? –the difference can only be a matter of degree. 

Alberti seems to have had the notion of useless learnedness.  He certainly had the idea of learnedness exercised to no true purpose.  An example is theological speculation.  As has been seen, he advised that people desist from enquiring  into God’s purposes except insofar as they are revealed in the world.[xxxix]  There is perhaps an irritation with instruments designed for fine work to the extent of being useless for practical tasks.  So, he refashions Minerva for the use of painters.  Whilst the mathematician works with immaterial lines, the painter works with something grosser, a practical geometry, a ‘grassa Minerva’.[xl]  Again, in De pictura, when discussing vision, he refuses to work at the level of physiological and theoretical detail where opticians operated.[xli]  For painters’ purposes, its geometrical character is sufficient; so there is a point at the eye.  In this, he differed from Ghiberti who, perhaps, lacked the learning to permit himself the arrogance to regard the finer points of Alhazen, Peckham, Bacon etc. as unnecessary for the artist.  Alberti adopted the same attitude when making fun of Vitruvius for requiring that the architect be knowledgeable in subjects that were periferal and not central to architecture.[xlii]  A point that Alberti makes repeatedly is that circumstances should direct actions.  That is, actions should not be predicted by a priori principles.  Pertinence is the measure.  It is the recurrent theme of De re aedificatoria.  Its personification, in De familia, is Giannozzo Alberti, the unlearned hero of the treatise.

Alberti is insistent on the point.  He seems to take up a position in a debate taking place at the time.  Gianozzo Manetti makes the distinction between the learned and the unlearned crucial in his report of Nicholas V’s testament of 1455: 

The immense, supreme authority of the Church of Rome can in the first place be understood only by those who have studied its origins and developments through the medium of the written word. But the masses of the population have no knowledge of literary matters and are without any kind of culture: and although they often hear men of learning and erudition state that the authority of the Church is supreme, and lend their faith to this assertion, reputing it to be true and indisputable, yet there is need for them to be awestruck by grandiose spectacle, lest their faith, resting as it does on weak and unstable foundation, might with the passage of time be finally reduced to naught. However, the grandeur of buildings, of monuments which are in a sense enduring and appear to testify to the handiwork of our Lord, serves to reinforce and confirm that faith of the common people which is based on the assertions of the learned, so that it is then propagated among the living and in the course of time passed on to all those who will be enabled to admire these wonderful constructions. This is the only way to uphold and extend the faith so that, preserved and increased in this way, it may be perpetuated with admirable devotion.[xliii] 

This is a tightly-argued statement.  Alberti, for his part, was not reticent in claiming entitlements for the erudite nor, as we see above, in disdaining the common herd.  But, whereas Nicholas, in Manetti’s account, claims a paternalist superiority over the uneducated, Alberti seeks out points of coincidence of interest between the learned and the unlearned.  In the prologue to Book III of De familia, he makes the argument that Latin was the volgare of ancient times and justifies his own use of Italian for the treatise.  ‘Benche stimo niuno dotto negará quanto a me pare qui da credere, che tutti gli antichi scrittori scrivessero in modo che da tutti e’ suoi molto voleano essere intesi.’  He continues, referring to his own text, ‘E chi  sará quel temerario che pur mi perseguiti biasimando s’io non scrivo in modi che lui non m’intenda?’[xliv] Like others, he was hugely impressed by Aesop whose fables were emphatically accessible to universal interpretation.  Then, all were equipped to recognise the good and all possessed the power of empathy whereby, before the Historia, like the drama, they could ‘laugh with those who laugh and weep with those who weep.’[xlv] It must follow that, if recognising virtue, making moral judgements and possessing an empathetic capability are universal, special revelation, authority and intercession would seem unimportant, if not philosophically unsustainable.  In the form of the gods subject to the enchantments of Stupor, as we saw above, Alberti satirizes those who proclaim themselves creatures of reason, superior to those whose knowledge is sensory in origin –that is, the unlearned. 

Just as there was a painting equally for the unlearned and the learned, might there be an architecture?  If so, it would be one protecting us from moral peril, one where we could act out our moral obligations and one where we could rejoice in the harmony of our own social relations.

The Problem of Evil

As has been seen, Alberti presents, most clearly through the voice of Leonardo Alberti in De Familia, an Argument from Design.  Together with the tenor of such an argument goes a philosophical scepticism, an unwillingness to speculate upon the content of the divine mind.  To repeat: ‘Cease. O Man, cease searching into the secrets of the gods deeper that mortals are allowed,’ say the shades in ‘Fatum et Fortuna’ in the first book of Intercenales.[xlvi]  Empiricism follows, and it is unable to avert its gaze.  ‘By his works shall ye know him.’

The Argument from Design stands upon optimistic grounds: it is the apparent harmony of connections in the natural world that implies an ordered mind in its designer.  Alberti’s meditations upon beauty, friendship and similar instances of the principle of harmonious coming-together – Empedoclean Love – are infused with optimism.  But, being also a realist, Alberti, in his writings, was sometimes contradictory.  A bleak and pessimistic reading of circumstances could oscillate with a sunny one. 

So, in the first of his Intercenales, ‘Scriptor’, Libripeta is in conversation with Lepidus.  Libripeta replies to Lepidus’ statement that he has been ‘striving to sow seeds of fame by writing’, with the advice, “Don’t try that on Tuscan soil, which lies entirely under the cloud of ignorance, and where all moisture is consumed by the heat of ambitions and desires.”[xlvii]  The argument is here broadly and starkly opposite to that stated in the Prologue to Della pittura, where Alberti says that his belief that the thriving condition of the visual arts shows his previous error in believing that the world’s creative powers were spent.  The dichotomy is not to be resolved by saying that Alberti’s view of the state of the visual arts was one thing and that of the literary, another.  In the Prologue, he had listed the kinds of intellectuals that were rarely to be found and little to be praise, and literary men were included.

Florence is also under a jaundiced eye in ‘Discordia’.  In the hills of Fiesole, Mercury meets Argos, who has been instructed by Jupiter to seek out on Earth the missing goddess, Justice.  The allegory is clear.  Argos has searched everywhere: “At last, I came to the beautiful city which you see at the foot of these mountains, for I believed that the goddess delighted in sumptuous and magnificent dwellings.  But there is not the least trace of her here.”  The depressive tone continues:  only “a few deranged old men near Evander’s dwelling” – Rome – have a folk tale about Justice once having dwelt there.  But now the city is deserted and ruinous.[xlviii]  Again, this is not the Florence of the Prologue to Della pittura.

So, Alberti proposes the Argument from Design at the same time as he observes signs of discontent.  Indeed, he acknowledges the counter-argument.  It is the Problem of Evil.  The rose has thorns; bee-stings are likely where the honey is to be found.  Creatures that sting, bite and predate upon their fellows present a problem where the Designer is to be the object of praise.  Death and predation –omnipresent and undeniable- make a nighmare of life. In ‘Discordia’, the goddess of that name possesses such extensive powers of destruction on earth and among the gods themselves, that the latter –ever interested in power– make their separate claims to be her parent. Alberti gathers these thoughts about discontent and discord with particular boldness in his conception of Momus in the extended fable of that name.  He is like Discordia’s brother. The god seeds dissension, conflict, misunderstanding, falsehood…  The list is endless in a world, of inverted character and values, that shares the same place as that described by Leonardo.  Jupiter, having made the world as perfectly as he could, invited the gods to make their additions.  They contributed useful and agreeable things: “Only Momus, overbearing and obstinate, boasted that he would give nothing.”  Eventually prevailed upon, “ … he devised a gift worthy of himself.  He filled the world with bugs, moths, wasps, hornets, cockroaches and other nasty little creatures, similar to himself.”[xlix]

Whilst Alberti could state his credo in the words of Leonardo, he had another credo that cast the world as differently as could be.  In the first book of his Intercenales, ‘Patientia’ speaks: “…what great and diverse maladies completely fill the lives of men!  I think that anyone can see that the gods have created this mortal race for only one reason – that in their anger they may torment them savagely in countless ways.”[l]  The voice would be histrionic were not same point made in Momus: “Either the gods do not exist at all, or if they do exist, they are always hostile to wretched mortals, actively seeking to do us harm.”[li]  Here, there are not flowers, breezes, sweet odours and the song of birds, but the hellish creatures of Momus’ world; things morbid, vicious, poisonous and cacophanous.  Snicker-snack.  Momus’s world, here, is that of Epicurus (and his disciple, Lucretius).  The point emerges from a larger discussion proving the indifference or hostility of the gods.  If we were to allow the gods’ existence, their felicity contrasts so utterly to the misery of human existence that the latter should more readily curse than worship the gods.[lii]

The world, then, is inhabited by things nasty to humankind, and the organism itself is subject  to sickness and disease.  Worst though; a man’s most dangerous enemy is his own companion on this Earth.  Neophronus, in the Intercenale ‘Defunctus’, says, “…human beings are the greatest bane of the human race.”[liii]  It should be otherwise for, as his interlocutor, Polytropos, says later, “…men were created for men’s sake…”[liv]  We are therefore obligated by nature to give assistance to our fellows.  Neophronus, however, expresses the most profound and far-reaching misanthropy, and the dialogue as a whole presents an inverse picture of paterfamilias and family to that of Giannozzo and Book III of De familia.  He himself is guilty of folly of all sorts, a prominent one being excessive frugality, precisely the masserizia that Giannozzo exercised.  Misanthropy’s most insistent voice is Momus (who is, of course, no less bitter towards the gods, for he is the very principle of rancour).   Jupiter in Book II of the fable makes a long self-justifying speech, refuting the accusation that humankind’s miseries are the fault of the gods.  He states his point in sharpest terms: “Man is the plague of man,”[lv] and vows to replace the world that he has made with another –or rather, to consider doing so and take advice.  

It is in the moral state of Momus’ world that the good can go unrecognised or even be despised.  That is the complaint of the goddess Virtue in the Intercenale ‘Virtus’.  Impiety and injustice reign.  The contrast is with the Elysian Fields.  She was a fine and admired figure there, her celebrants Plato, Socrates, Demosthenes, Cicero, Archimedes, Polycleitus, Praxiteles etc.[lvi] In this listing of philosophers, orators, scientists, painters and sculptors there is a recollection perhaps of the happy land which was Florence in the Prologue to Della pittura, where the shortage of  ‘painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, geometricians, rhetoricians, augers  and similar most noble and marvellous minds’ had ceased.  The dedicatee of ‘Virtus’ was Paolo Toscanelli, the famous physician.  He would have identified Florence as generically the place where virtue had been put aside and fortune embraced.  Alberti goes on bitterly to recount that  the goddess Virtue is also shut out from Jupiter’s presence.

Evil and ugliness for the optimist can be no more than the want of good or perfect beauty.  Alberti is in sanguine humour when he writes about beauty and ornament in Book VI, chapter 2 of De re aedificatoria.  It is not given to Nature to create anything perfectly beautiful; but a material sticking-plaster is available to mitigate the deficiency.  Alberti jokes: ‘“How rare,” remarks Cicero, “is a beautiful youth in Athens!” That Connoisseur found their forms wanting because they either hadtoo much or too little of something by which they failed to conform to the laws of beauty.  In this case, unless I am mistaken, had ornament been applied by painting and masking anything ugly, or by grooming and polishing the attractive, it would have had the effect of making the displeasurable less offensive and the pleasing more delightful.’ extraordinary a thing (says the person introduced in Tully) is a handsome youth in Athens!  This critick in beauty found that there was something deficient or superfluous, in the persons he disliked, which was not compatible with the perfection of beauty, which I imagine might have been obtained by means of ornament, by painting or concealing  any thing that was deformed, and trimming and polishing what was handsome.”[lvii]  Ornament is a material solution to a problem conceived as a material one, the relucance of matter to receive form.

If humankind, as Patientia in the Intercenales says, is cursed to suffer maladies, the only philosophy to adopt is Stoicism.  She quotes an incantation of Chronos: “Now that you feel that you were born human [an experience inseparable from suffering], learn to bear all fortune with equanimity.”[lviii]  Hope and expectation are unable to ease the pain of the unfortunate.  Alberti, in the voice of Patientia, is in bleak mood when diligence and work cannot assuage either.  Hope might be offered to the lucky, but not even that is available to people of Alberti’s class, the scholars who live a hand-to-mouth existence under the yoke of Necessity, the mother of Patientia, their only comfort.

Anti-clericalism: priesthood

Alberti’s anti-clericalism expressed itself pretty candidly on occasion.  The clergy receive a blanket criticism, along with lawyers and doctors, for being money-grubbing, in the Intercenale, ‘Corolle’, or ‘Garlands’.  The goddess Praise, has come to the piazza to distribute garlands to the deserving.  Her companion, Envy, says that there is no one worthy to receive a garland. ‘There are jurists, physicians, and theologians here,’ says Praise.  Envy responds, ‘They have no interest in your garlands.  Gold and ambition are what they seek, maiden’.[lix] However, the depth of his anti-clericalism needs to be gauged.  It is one kind of anti-clericalism to point to instances of clergymen falling short of standards.  It is another to say that their vices are the very consequences of their religious role.  A third kind makes it logically necessary that the clergy’s claim to authority be false.  Finally, the most profound anti-clericalism carries the accusation that the clergy knows that its claims are not true.

The higher clergy, in particular, were easy to criticise for their ostentation on the one hand and remoteness on the other.  They are a by-word for luxury and extravagance in Alberti’s passing remark, in De iciarchia, criticizing the over-furnished pleasure-villa: ‘la sala, la mensa, tutto parato a imitazione de’ massimi prelati.’[lx]  Giannozzo Alberti does not mince his words in vituperating them in De familia.  He quotes approvingly the pronouncement of a family retainer that the higher clergy are worse than useless: ‘Such priests are made like a lantern which, placed on the ground, gives illumination and which, raised aloft, the higher it goes the more it casts useless shadows of itself.’[lxi]  First, Lionardo Alberti is critical of Pope John XXIII Cossa (1410 – 1415): ‘There were in him some vices, first of all one that is common to nearly all priests and is most glaring: he was very eager for money, to such an extent that everything about him was for sale.  Many tell at length of infamous perpetrators of simony, of black-marketeers and fabricators of every falsehood and fraud.’[lxii]  This is straight-speaking.  The extended account is of disorder and venality.  That, at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy there should be disfunction, moral delinquency, contention, all falls apart [Get the passage in Book four of De familia, where Piero Alberti describes Giovanni XXIII’s  court.]Alberti was also critical of the clergy within the pages of De re aedificatoria.  He wrote a distilled account of the decline of the Church since early Christian times:

In ancient times, in the primitive days of our religion, it was the custom for good men to come together and share a common meal.   […] to become humbler through their communication, and to fill their minds with sound instruction, so that they would return home all the more intent upon virtue. […]  Everyone would burn with concern for the common salvation and with love of virtue. […]  Later, when princes allowed these meetings to become public, there was little deviation from the original custom […] There would be a single altar, where they would meet to celebrate no more than one sacrifice each day.  There followed the practice of our own times, which I only wish some man of gravity would think fit to reform.  I say this with all due respect to our bishops, who, to preserve their dignity, allow the people to see them scarcely once in the year of festivals, yet so stuff everything with altars, and even …  I shall say no more.  Let me simply state that within the mortal world there is nothing to be found, or even imagined, that is more noble or holy than the sacrifice.  I would not consider anyone who wanted to devalue such great things, by making them too readily available, a person of good sense.[lxiii]

Fuelling the narrative is probably recollection of a verse  in the Acts of the Apostles:  ‘And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart…’(2:46), or else, ‘And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.’(4:32)

Alberti prefaced this passage with a pretended deference to higher opinion over the matter of whether there should be one or more altars in a church: ‘Aras autem sacrificii gratia intra templum complures disseminare an deceat, aliorum sit iudicii.’[lxiv]  He would leave it to others to judge whether it was appropriate that there should be a large number of altars in a church.  The bishop gives a sense of occasion to his appearance by making it infrequent.  In contrast, the mass becomes quotidian – mundane – because of the proliferation of altars.  The effect is that clergy are making themselves more important than their offices.  But the argument is somewhat muddling, for Alberti understands the law of supply and demand; it is parsimony that devalues the gift of the sacrifice, not liberality.  Alberti adopts a slippery argument here; and, to the extent that it is unclear, it is indicative of his own diffidence about straight-speaking and his desire that the reader work out the rights and wrongs for himself.  We are not to agree straightforwardly with the final sentence of the passage above.  Alberti has presented to the reader the clergyman and the altar; the one rare and the other common.  Although the sentence appears to be addressing the matter of altars, it cannot but contain a challenge to the question of the conduct of the clergy.  A single daily service of the eucharist before the whole congregation was the duty of the good priest.[lxv]

            Alberti’s thoughts turn upon the matter of the pact between clergy and the wealthy –the last stage in his history of the decline of Christianity– whereby the moneyed steal a march on the poor by buying the clergy’s intecession on their behalf.  In Book VII, Chapter 2 of De re aedificatoria, he finds the ancient temple becoming materially enriched by kings and wealthy citizens and neglecting the homage owed to to the frugal ancestors of the place: ‘Even when the city was flourishing, these [the temples of the Athenian Acropolis and of the Roman Capitol] were roofed in straw and reeds, on the basis that it was important to uphold ancestral traditions of frugality.  But as kings that other citizens grew wealthier, and were tempted to dignify their city and their own names with buildings of great size…’[lxvi] The usurpations of the wealthy are further observed in another history of religion.  Monuments were set up to mark the expansion of the empire and to honour those who achieved it.  They came to be places where the nation’s thanks would be expressed and were thank-offerings would be made. Columns, altars and small temples came to be set up, and the wealthy and the lucky displayed their piety there alongside the heroes: ‘Hosce subinde non modo qui patriam re aliqua iuvissent, sed etiam felices et fortunate, quantum peropes eorum ostendere licuit, secuti sunt.’ [lxvii]

Alberti satirises that general state of things bitterly in the Intercenale ‘Oraculum’: Philargius says, “I am amazed that this marble statue of Apollo … has abandoned its former habitual generosity and liberality.  It used to utter oracles free of charge to both poor and rich alike, but now speaks only upon payment. […] I shall approach and be the first to buy an oracle.’ [Marsh, p.35] The Intercenale, ‘Nummus’, is even more explicit.  The priests go to the Oracle to know which of the (false) gods is most to be worshipped.  The message comes from Apollo that the answer will be found upon the tripod.  There, they find a coin: money, they conclude, is to be their god.  Alberti concludes, “Either because they revere the ancient and holy law of their forebears, or because they heartily approve the god’s pronouncement in this sacred matter, priests value this oath so highly that, even to the present day, no priest has incurred even the slightest ssupicion of perjury in this regard.” [Marsh, p.51] The disdain is Himalayan. [this perhaps goes elsewhere]

In the dialogue, Pontifex, the proper conduct of the clergy is laid out, and delinquent conduct, like luxury and simony, is denounced.[lxviii]  A clergyman who combined exclusiveness and stupidity conducted the obsequies of Neophronus in the Intercenale, ‘Defunctus’.  Alberti called him Bishop Hermio.[lxix]

In pointing to bishops’ rationing of their appearances before the faithful, Alberti refers to a tendency for them to absent themselves from their diosceses and operate through vicars or curates.  This is pastoral neglectfulness.  Its consequences are sure; a flock gone astray.  By contrast, a congregation inspired to good conduct in the world by their common dedication to the values of the common table, under the benign guidance of the pastor or paterfamilias, has experienced a quasi-pentecostal inspiration.

At worst, however, the higher clergy –specifically in the hierarchical  structure of their governance– comprised a tyranny, the rule of the self-interested.  More than just hinting at the oppressiveness of Church government is Alberti’s Intercenale, ‘Lacus’.  The once-shared place of the fish and the frogs becomes divided between them, and quarrelling soon breaks out.  The fish call in a serpent to victimise their new enemies, the frogs who, in their turn, call in an otter to do the same to the fish.  The fisher predates upon the fish in an ironic parody of the successors of the Fisher of Men, the occupants of the throne of St Peter.[lxx]

The clergy in general are criticised in ‘Hedera’, or ‘Ivy’.  A pear-tree observes the priests decorating their temple with ivy, a plant that damages buildings (and is worn by Bacchus).  It complains that they are dedicating their religion to sterility and destruction.  The ivy replies to the pear-tree, ‘Weren’t you aware that this breed of men has always revered and loved the wicked and those that can harm them most?’[lxxi]  Momus transformed himself into ivy in order the break into the temple and rape the goddess Praise.[lxxii]

The Intercenale,  ‘Templum’ (Marsh 175-76) advances the Franciscan argument contained in the story of the Dream of Pope Innocent III (in which St Francis upholds the collapsing Lateran).  Alberti relates how the foundation stones of the temple resented their subjugation  to the finished stones of the superstructure.  They rebel, and the temple falls down.  Alberti’s criticism is of the higher clergy.[lxxiii] The Church is properly at ground level, in the dutiful service of lower clergy.  The radical implication is that it is held up by what is below, not what is above.

True religion did not consist in ostentation –preening self-display.  That is the hidden argument of the Apologo XXI: “Candelabra aurea et pretiosissimis gemmis ornata demirabantur quidnam esset quod simulacrum ligneum putridum atque in eam diem invisum, modo prae se adoraretur. Respondit simulacrum: ‘Personam dei gerimus.’”  The candelabrum, gilded and enriched with the most precious gems, did not understand why the wooden effigy, begrimed and till then little noted, had now come to be adored.  The image replied: “We represent the person of God.”[lxxiv]  Even a possibly well-intentioned clergy is guilty of pride.  In the Intercenale, ‘Religio’, the leader in prayer is accused of presuming that his voice moves the gods more than that of the needy themselves.[lxxv]

As well as by means of allegory, the clergy were criticised in the guise of pagan priests in their relations with the gods and goddesses, in other words, the principles that they represented.  So, in the Intercenale, ‘Nummus’, Alberti is able to have a gathering of priests at Delphi debating which divinity was most worth their veneration.  Some advance Venus, some Hypocrisy and some Bacchus.[lxxvi]  The reader is not to conclude that Alberti is criticising long-dead pagan priests for carnality, hypocrisy and sottishness.  Finding a coin upon the tripod of Apollo, the priests believe that the oracle has spoken.  Lucre is to be their first love, “…even to the present day.”

In De Familia, Giannozzo Alberti’s anticlericalism, when set alongside his personal virtue and piety is surprising.  But it chimes with the passage in De re aedificatoria and the Intercenales, ‘Lacus’ and ‘Hedera’.  He extended his diatribe: Giannozzo amplifies the criticism to the higher priesthood in general:

Nor do I marvel that if, as you (Lionardo Alberti) said, priests are greedy, they struggle to take advantage of one another and none has the required virtue and learning – few are the priests who are literate and fewer still who are honest.  But they all want to out-do each other in pomp and ostentation; they want a great number of well-fed and lavishly caparisoned retinue; they want to go out in public with great troups of hangers-on; and all together from day to day have lascivious, hasty and unmeasured appetites for an excess of idleness and a minimum  of goodness. [lxxvii]  

He makes a clear set of connections between ignorance, ostentation, emulation, ungoverned appetite and contention.  Reduced to the core set of ignorance, pleasure-seeking and contention, they appear in Sentenze pitagoriche: ‘Detestabile morbo la ignoranza; fraudolentissimo inimico la volutta; esecrabile furia la contenzione.  Padre e Dio ottimo e massimo aiutaci fuggirle e odiarle!’  Perhaps thinking of them as vices particularly to be found among the clergy, God’s aid is invoked to flee and disdain them.[lxxviii]  Where Giannozzo’s set of factors obtains, the consequences for the Church will clearly be disastrous.  That is because these are the factors that are ruinous also for society and civilization in general. 

Alberti is perhaps thinking about the role of religion in fomenting more recent conflicts in the Intercenale, ‘The Cynic’.  The same chain of vices that Giannozzo denounced is laid out, together with their consequences.  Mercury has delivered the dead souls for the judgement of Phoebus.  They are gathered into their classes or professions and will be returned to life clad in appropriate bodies.  Cynic offers to question them about their conduct on Earth and expose what lies they told.  He contradicts their job-description: ‘We interpreted the will of the gods, celebrated their rites, and practiced piety.  Men rightly called us fathers and most holy guardians.’

Dishonest, shameless, and fouled with every vice, they made a pretence of seeming virtuous men.  They impudently claim that they spend entire nights communing with celestial powers, and conversing with the gods of heaven and hell.  By this deception, they have managed to live in lazy indolence, getting drunk at the expense of others.  How pious and holy their worship has been, I expect that you gods know full well.

Phoebus, do you hear the sound of arms, the groans of wounded men, and the din of collapsing buildings and cities with which the seas and mountains resound?  These depraved men have wrought this woe through their fraud and treachery, inciting one faction to violence and another to revenge.  Let me briefly describe this baneful race.  They are idle and indolent, and sunk in debauchery and drowniness.  Their gullets are immense, their tongues impudent, their brows brazen, and their greed and avarice implacable.  They contend among themselves in hatred, foment discord between men of peace, and stir up war and destruction.  In short, they are the principal instigators and architects of all crimes and sins.[lxxix]

The cynic is not to be expected to be looking for the mitigating sunbeam.  But it is Alberti who has put together this connected diatribe.  And Mercury, Phoebus and the Cynic have more to say.  The decision is taken that the clergy be rendered harmless by being turned into asses.

The parallel between the spectacles of civil and moral ruination is clear when Giannozzo’s and the Cynic’s descriptions of a decadent clergy are set alongside Alberti’s account of the decline of the Macedonian empire in the prologue to Book I of De familia: ‘Vero, doppo la morte d’Allessandro Grande, subito ch’ e’ principi macedoni cominciarono ciascuno a procurare e’ suoi propri beni, e aversi solliciti non al publico imperio, ma curiosi a’ privati regni, fra loro subito nacquero discordie…  […] Così adunque finirono non la fortuna, ma loro stultizia e’ Macedoni la conseguita sua felicità, e trovoronsi in poco tempo senza imperio e senza gloria.’[lxxx] The Roman empire, for its part, thrived so long as public interest was more important than private interest: ‘…quanto tempo ancora in loro più valse l’amore delle publice cose che delle private, più la volontà della patria che le proprie cupiditati, tanto sempre con loro fu imperio, gloria e anche fortuna.’  But this happy state of things did not last: ‘Subito che la libidine del tiranneggiare e i singulari commodi […] subito cominciò lo imperio latino a debilitarsi e inanire, a perdere la grazia, decore e tutte le sue pristine forze.’[lxxxi] Battista in Cena familiaris, lays out the mechanics of moral and social decline and eventual ruination: ‘Del contendere surge gara, della gara ostinazione, della ostinazione ingiuria, della ingiuria iurgio e rissa e arme.’[lxxxii]  Clergy, as much as tyrant and self-seeker, presides over this state of things.

There is a virtue, for Alberti in the voice of Giannozzo as a critic of the clergy, that is emphatically wanting.  It is frugality.  Where frugality is honoured, all may be well.  While the ancient Romans remembered their original frugality, their civilisation, and their architecture, thrived.  Alberti wrote of the Romans’ preference for frugality: ‘..they [the Romans] preferred to temper the splendor of their most powerful kings with a traditional frugality…’[lxxxiii]  But why was it such a salutary virtue: what is it as an active principle of conduct?  Alberti addressed these questions with particular directness in his display of the actions and character of Giannozzo Alberti, in Book III of De familia. The essence of frugality is masserizia –a kind of good housekeeping.  Frugality, for Giannozzo, is not parsimoniousness.  It is spending when circumstances require, and thereby assisting others.  There must be a general rule; that actions are to be fitted to circumstances.  The principle of adaptive action is observation, not inflexible rule or casual habit, not yet the passions: it is the acknowledgement of circumstances.  Frugality is also the studious avoidance of meretricious display, of ostentation.  Alberti sees ostentation, as the quotation above shows, as part of a process that creates distance between people.  In Empedoclean terms, it is an instance of gara or strife, the centrifugal force in Nature and Society that operates in the opposite direction from amicizia.  Contention and ostentation are able to arise where frugality is missing.

Thus, Nicholas V’s argument in favour of an architecture of overwhelming spectacle  and scrupulous ritual observance, as ennunciated by Giannozzo Manetti [lxxxiv] and as remarked upon by Platina and Pius II [lxxxv], is to be read as an advocacy of distance between clergy and the lay faithful.  Alberti, and probably the other voices, took the contrary view, and reprehended the gap.  The logic of this analysis must have it that Alberti believed that the privileges of priesthood engendered vice and a state of social and moral ruin.  It is confirmed by what he said elsewhere, for example, where he lamented a remote and seldom-seen clergy, and a proliferation of altars, where the rich paid to have masses said for the sake of their salvation in disregard of that of their poor fellows.[lxxxvi]

It is a prevailing vice to seek personal salvation, and Alberti takes a casual swipe at the selfishness that it epitomises even in the most inappropriate circumstances where, in Momus, ‘Meanwhile the leading gentlemen and the most important matrons entered the temple to greet the goddess [Virtue].’ ‘Interea proceres primariaeque matronae … in templum deam consalutatum ingressi sunt.’ ‘With great insistence they asked and besought the deities to accept their private hospitality.’ ‘…cumque rogare obtestarique perseverarent ut privatum  apud se hospitio diverterent.’[lxxxvii] In private chapels and chantries the wealthy presume to hold the attention of the divinity, and would exclude the common people from the intercourse.  In Alberti’s fable, Momus joins the dispossessed crowd outside the temple and foments a frankly levelling and republican uprising.[lxxxviii] It is difficult to think that it is not Alberti himself who emerges here from behind Momus and reveals his anger at injustice in religion and politics.  Of course, whilst Alberti might acknowledge righteous indignation, he is no supporter of sedition, and Virtue quells the rebellious voice of Momus in the heart of the mob.

Self-seeking by the powerful, which must include the higher clergy, is denounced in the bitterest terms in the Intercenale, ‘Discordia’.  They defile justice itself.  Mercury has come to earth to summon the goddess Justice.  They squabbling gods are been claiming paternity of the goddess, Discord.  The most plausible claim is that of Honour (that is, the god who distributes primacies): ‘But the one god who excels the others in authority and dignity, Honor, summons as witness all kings and rulers and even the gods, and divulges both the time and place in which he begat Discord by the goddess Justice.’[lxxxix]  In a similar way, they had misrepresented the Christian call to salvation by pursuing it individually and at others’ expense, and neglecting the first congregational amicizia.  Alberti’s thinking at this point leads him close to a profound social radicalism.

Favouring frugality is not to be taken simply for support for Franciscan poverty.  Rather, Alberti’s position seems to be close to that of the Brethren of the Common Life and their sympathisers.  These people favoured frugality, but not poverty.  Giannozzo Alberti is the exemplary pious layman.  He will have property and investments.  He will be busy about the increase of wealth; but he will also be attentive to its timely distribution.  Giannozzo and Alberti remembered the Parable of the Talents whilst St Francis neglected it.

A passage in Momus, by logical extension, is a criticism of the poverty of the Observant life, though it is questionable that Alberti intended that the consequence be drawn.  Mercury has been mistaken by Diogenes for the destroyer of his tub and has been given a beating by the philosopher.  Mercury muses, “They walk around naked, they live in squalor, they inhabit tubs, they’re cold and hungry.  Who could stand them, when they can’t stand themselves. {…} Isn’t it madness to refuse to enjoy things that contribute to a decent appearance and good nutrition, things that all mortals use? […] But we permit those filthy men to be wretched, so long as they live their gross way of life according to some odious philosophical system.”[xc]

However, Alberti and Giannozzo (and perhaps the others) were Franciscans insofar as the logic of Franciscanism was an implicit rejection of priesthood.  Francis’ acceptance  of Obedience as one of the vows of his order was a renaiging on the principle of the universal priesthood that was contained in his concept of the Imitation of Christ.  Alberti’s notion of priesthood as an improper claim of categorical distinctness and of superiority over the mass of humankind sometimes emerges in a direct anti-clericalism.  A chilly remoteness and ostentation –an unproductive and selfish use of wealth whose effect upon others can only be impoverishment– epitomised a clergy forgetful of its pastoral role.  These are connected ideas that comprise what could be called Alberti’s anti-credo.  When he deals with their opposites, however, he can expatiate more largely.  Frugality, fraternity and attentive care on the part of the paterfamilias are good things, to which it is impossible to take exception.  Brothers do not acknowledge social difference between them.  The  paterfamilias embraces his duty of care and is therefore a true shepherd to his flock (or spider at the centre of his web). His authority derives from his wisdom and virtue, as Alberti explains in De iciarchia.[xci] The connections between pastor and flock, or father and family, in happy social and moral circumstances, are plain to see.  Acquiescing in the logic of their connectedness binds us, at the same time, to the unstated logic of their venal opposites.  To put the point in brief terms, Giannozzo, by his simple life and work, indicts a self-regarding, idle clergy.  He is the Roman whilst they are barbarians.

But hypocrisy and deceit are the worst crimes of clery.  Alberti alluded to them in ‘Cynic’, above. He points to the villainy also in a speech by Momus: Theological opinion differered.’Others did not themselves believe that the gods existed … The y added the practice of pretending to be the interpreters pf the gods, inventing vain fictiobns to suggest that they were holding lofty exchanges with nymphs, utelary spirits and even the important gods.’ (§75, p.75/76)

Anti-clericalism: monasticism

Alberti took a dim view of the priesthood in its fostering of superstitious practices and in its claim to privy knowledge of God’s purposes.  As Lionardo Alberti said and as the other passages quoted above argue implicitly, Nature is the limit of human knowledge of God.  From her products we construe Her processes; God’s directing of these processes must be simply axiomatic, defying any further enquiry into causes. 

The other religion, that of the cloister, is no more admirable.  It is in order to ridicule monastic life that, in Book.V, 6, of De re aedificatoria, Alberti likens the cloister to the soldiers’ camp, describing monks as warriors in the battle of virtue and vice.[xcii]  Whilst observants might be entitled to make the claim, it was only really the parish clergy who could do so with conviction.  In Book V, 7, Alberti announces his cynicism at the beginning.  He writes that the cloister is the clergy’s fortress where, ‘…aut pietatis aut virtutis gratia plurimi convenere…’[xciii]  By placing ‘aut’ before each of the options, he emphasises that one or other is the motive of conventualism, with the result that virtue and piety seem mutually exclusive.  He goes on to say that the duties of service to his fellow man are no different in the monk than the layman.[xciv]  Indeed, the religious is to learn from the layman.  By including the thought that the clergy wish to be and to be seen to be virtuous, he plants the possibility of seeming being separate from being.

Alberti has already made a distinction between castles and simple fastnesses, likening the latter to the convent: ‘And in my view, just as one cannot praise the courage of a soldier who chooses only to resist the attack of his enemy, so I think that a castle properly is not there just to defy attack, but should also assault the attackers.’[xcv] What this castle and this cloister have in common is that they enclose their occupants.  A building consisting morally of walls alone – without gate, tower or crenellation, the instruments of assault upon the enemy – accommodates only the slothful; those subject to the most debilitating and infectious vice.  A monastery/camp that had no offensive capability – that is, was incapable of service – would to be worthy of disdain.  To shut oneself away from temptation is not to master ones appetites.   Alberti states the point in general terms in De iciarchia: ‘La voluttà gioverà non sempre fuggirla. Sarà forse più sicuro fuggir l’insidie dello inimico, ma certo sarà più fortezza el superarlo. Così nelle voluttà, chi sempre le fugge, né mai ardisce trovarsi dove e’ provi quanto e’ puote e vale, ma come male armato si ritiene e teme troppo el suo pericolo, non acquista laude quanto chi presente vince contrastando.’[xcvi]  Virtue and Truth are what are needed for the happy life.  Tranquillity of mind and freedom from material concerns are required. The monastery supplies these.  But Alberti goes on immediately to talk of the duty of virtue to engage with the world and its sufferings.  In a passage about the hospital in Book V, Chapter 8, by limiting the role of the clergy to pastoral care, he implicitly excludes the sacerdotal: ‘Caeterum, quo pietatem adversus imbecilles et destitutos exerceat pontifex, locus erit et varius et summa diligentia constituendus: nam alibi aegrotantes suscipias et foveas necesse est.’[xcvii]  He also talks elsewhere (in De familia and Profugiorum for example) about ‘tranquillità dell’anima’, and names his heroes, Archimedes and Brunelleschi, exemplars of the active intellect.  It is necessary to argue, then, that Cristoforo Landino, when, in his Disputationes Camaldulenses of 1475, he casts Alberti as vehement apologist for the vita  contemplativa, was not representing Alberti’s own view on the matter.[xcviii]

In his disdain of the monastic life, Alberti is close to Lorenzo Valla, expressing in his dialogue of c.1441, De professione religiosorum, the view that those who remove themselves from life cannot claim moral superiority over those who conduct themselves well in the real world.[xcix]

A criticism of mendicantism is perhaps to be taken from Giannozzo Alberti’s response  in De Familia to the question how he would supply his household.  He would not resort to his own supply but would spend money to acquire what was required in the market, ‘Perche ivì in più persone il denaro si sparge.’[c] Putting money into the economy of exchange is better, it seems, than giving to the poor

Anti-clericalism: the hierarchy

Momus has frequently been read as a roman à clef, Jupiter standing in for the pope and Olympus for the Curia.[note]  Nicholas V and Eugenius IV are identified as the targets of Alberti’s satire.  To reduce the scope of the book to Church politics is to shrink the imagination in which it has bubbled and sparked –it seems sometimes uncontrollably– into existence.  But the theme is present, and most prominently so in Book IV.

Charon wants to explore the world above and recruits as his guide, Gelastus, the scholar so reduced to poverty by the indifference of society that he lacks even the price of the ferryman.  It is a bold joke satirizing the Epic itself as well as presenting a satirical Odyssey in the course of which much of the risible and disgraceful will be witnessed.

Heroes were obliged by the Epic form to risk the Underworld.  Orpheus, Aeneas and Dante were among them.  Alberti turns the trope on its head.  Traffic between earth and heaven had been frequent in the first three books (–satirical in itself, for their theme was largely the human folly of belief in an immanent God).  As it were to establish symmetry in the structure of the larger fable, Charon journeys from Hell to the middle-world of humankind.

The ferryman is to be understood as a sort of pontifex, a bridger of waters.  St Peter is his counterpart.  Provided with the Keys, the Fisher of Men will conduct people to the other side or not.  Only the faithful will pass over Jordan.  Alberti’s Charon is easily set alongside Peter’s fifteenth-century successors.  And we see him as a parody-pope.  His oar serves as his crosier, and he carries his boat upon his head as his tiara.  A stately progress is perhaps to be pictured, but it is one by the hand of Hieronymus Bosch or his followers.  There need be no diffidence in proposing this reading of Book IV, and therefore Alberti’s criticism of the papacy and even the occupants of the role is blatant.

Criticism of pious practices

Alberti is critical of the conduct of the clergy and of the theology by which they justify it.  Praise of Nature – as opposed sycophantic acceptance of the terms of the traders in salvation – cannot be mercenary.  What we are given, he says, is bounteously before us.  There is no more to ask.  Deriving from this understanding is Alberti’s love of the villa, a theme discussed and touched upon repeatedly in his writings.   His sense is that there, especially, we find ourselves showered with this bounty.  As he says, the economy of effort and reward that we normally insist upon does not apply at the villa: “…for a little sweat, many casks of wine.”[ci]  It had not applied at the service of the mass either.  If, however, God should have gifts hidden from mortals, a different response is appropriate; we must petition to receive them or attempt to set up a quid pro quo.  Alberti is strongly opposed to prayer that asks for something.  It is the opposite of gratitude and praise, the proper responses to Nature as Lionardo expresses the matter.  He allows that, in times of difficulty, we will pray.  Our inspiring principle is Hope, the one goddess as Ovid, quoted in Alberti’s Intercenale ‘Naufragio’ had it, who remained on earth when the others took themselves off to heaven.[cii]  But the presence of hope is no guarantee of the fact of salvation.

Momus is elaborate in its denunciation of prayer.  It is Momus himself, disguised as a girl, who introduces it to the world.  Alberti has already established that the gods are in need of the acknowledgement of mortals: they are not self-sufficient.[get quote or paraphrase]  Now, Momus instructs girls in cosmetics: ‘…we  can copy the divine looks of Aurora as much as we like, and when we get into trouble, we have a ready way to serve and placate the holy immortal gods; in this way, if they’re willing to approve our requests, we can bind ourselves to the gods, as it were commercially, through this simple and smooth exchange.  So get on with it now, girls, and don’t be shy about petitioning the gods in prayer for whatever they will grant.’ [ciii]  From small beginnings, the practice of petition spread, like a disease.  Momus soliloquises, as he congratulates himself on the mischief he has wrought: ‘What is there that they [humans] will not seek to acquire through prayer?  They will covet stupidly, aspire rashly, demand shamelessly.’ ‘Quid erit quod votis non aggrediatur? Stulte appetet, temere affectabit, proterve exposcet.’[civ]  At this moment, the relationship between gods and humans changes.  By an exquisite reversal of power, if the latter believe in prayer, the gods cannot disregard the fact, and the commerce must begin.  Petition is a request that conceals a threat: the bitter spirit of Momus promises the apostasy of the disappointed petitioner.[cv]  The indifference of the gods to prayer is made evident when the great arch collapses: ‘It had been built by Juno and covered with gold melted down from votive objects.’ ‘…quem quidem Iuno coaedificarat auroque votorum conflate operuerat,’[§100, p.176/177]

Elsewhere in his writings, Alberti criticises prayer as a commercial activity.  In the short dialogue, ‘Religio’, one of his Intercenales, his interlocutor, Lepidus, confesses to Libripeta that time spent at mass has delayed their meeting.  Libripeta replies, ‘What deals were you making with the gods, that your discussions went on for so long?’  This translation of the Latin differs in tone from the Italian of Ida Garghella and the English of David Marsh.[cvi]  Girolamo Mancini supplies the Latin:  ‘Verum tu quidem quid habuistis commercii cum diis ut itsic sermones tam longos ageres?’[cvii]  Garghella translates ‘commercii’ as ‘faccende’ and March as ‘business’.  The freer translation here focusses upon the tone of sarcasm in Libripeta’s voice.  The dialogue as a whole is a debate about the efficacy of prayer.  Libripeta rejects the possibility, and expresses himself colourfully.  He replies, with irony, to Lepidus’ remonstration that there is nothing improper in asking God for the fulfilment of one’s wishes: ‘Sacris istis sub tectis ubi vulgus ille sacerdotum lateat, belle te superi audiunt.’  Prayers, says Libripeta with a sneer, will assuredly be heard under a roof where priests throng in a mob.[cviii]  Priests who normally meet in chapters and synods here meet more disreputably.  The implication is that petition, being a confession of need or desire, is an exposure of weakness, and weakness invites exploiters.  Libripeta warms to his theme: ‘Consequently, you rave like madmen if you think your words or arguments will sway the gods’ intent and actions from their age-old course to new undertakings.’[cix]  He indicates that those gods who would demand such tribute would be nothing but hangers-on and leeches (’satellites atque praedones’).[cx]  That is just how the gods conduct themselves in Momus; eager for flattery and ambitious for buildings whose construction materials are the offerings of the prayerful.  In Momus, heaven becomes a stinking cess-pit of vile petitions; what once was a prayer for the success of one’s sowing becomes a cry for the blighting of one’s neighbour’s crop.[cxi]  In ‘Religio’, Libripeta says that to ask the gods for goods on this earth is to ask them to be thieves on our behalf.  Lepidus replies to the contrary: it was not as thieves but as labourers that he had asked the gods to act, for he had prayed for golden cabbages in his garden!  In ‘Pupillus’, Philoponius the orphan, a thinly disguised young Leon Battista, in despair at the wrongs suffered at the hands of his kinsmen, lists extravant prayers that he might have made before descending to realistic ones –the chance to continue his studies, the solace of friendship and the strength to endure less hurtful kinsman.  At last, is his distress and anger he calls upon the gods to curse all orphans with the ills that he has suffered.  As his friends depart, they themselves offer up a prayer or at any rate a pious wish: ‘Possono gli dei respondere alle tue giuste e nobili preghiere…’  But they and the Intercenale end on the sharpest note, for the gods will not be dismissive of Philoponius’s prayer for all orphans to suffer: ‘…se vogliono, non disdegeranno la tua richiesta.’(Garghella, p.25; Marsh, p.18.  Philoponius also appears in ‘Erumna’, in Book IV of the Intercenales, Marsh, pp.82-90) 

Momus spells out the immorality of prayer in part in paragraph 66 of Book I and elaborates the point narratively later on.  We find the following: ‘What good are all these supplications and entreaties, asking for peace from the gods who are either occupied elsewhere or actively doing us harm?’[cxii]  It is in Book II that we have the description of the collapse of Juno’s triumphal arch, a huge and opulent structure made of ex votos.[cxiii]  The reader is to understand that in its richness and magificence – and folly – it is no different from the Church on earth insofar as that is funded by pious hopes for individual salvation backed up by a financial payment, and by desires to thrive at the expense of one’s neighbours.

In conjuring up the image of Juno’s arch, a structure cluttered with ex votos, Alberti is perhaps thinking of the modern church filled with tombs, chantreys, oratories and their altars.  Though he particularly alludes to the miasma of decaying flesh, he was surely being metaphorical when he sought a church liberated of the clutter and perhaps clamour of prayer for the dead.  Burial ought not to be permitted in churches: ‘Itaque  laudandi veteres.  Nostros tamen non ausim vituperare: qui intra urbem sacrissimis locis condant: modo cadaver non intra templum inferant, ubi patres et magistratus ad aram vocatis superis conveniant.  Ex quo illud fiat interdum: ut sacrificii puritas contaminentur corrupti vaporis feditate.’ [cxiv]  Prayer infects the atmosphere whose purity is necessary for the mass.

Momus encounters a school of philosophers (or theologians, since the question that they are concerned with is the existence of the gods).  These, while not believing in the gods, conduct ceremonies and serve up arguments in favour of the existence of the gods so that they can have authority in the world.[cxv]  Their method is dissimulation.  This is the conduct of the clergy according to Alberti, in Pontifex, who appear pious and virtuous: “Their words are of a most studied chasteness whilst in life they are utterly promiscuous; by aspect and expression they present themselves as senstitive and grave whilst in their hearts and minds they are wholly lascivious and giddy”.[cxvi] Hypocrisy by commission must be one of the darkest of vices.

In Book III of Momus, Jupiter is, as we saw above, trying to decide whether or not to destroy the world and replace it with another, improved version.  Because of the lamentable state of ignorance in which he and the other gods live, the wisdom of the world’s philosophers is impressive to him.  He descends to the world of mortals in order to pick their brains.  But it is a muddling experience for him.  Thereafter, he sends Mercury, and then Apollo.  Meanwhile, word has got out in heaven that the world is going to be destroyed.  So, Famine, Plague etc. get to work straight away, in order to lighten their tasks later on.  “These disasters prompt the human race to pledge lavish games to the gods, for they have noticed that the gods are powerfully influenced by golden offerings.  …whatever worthy things there were among the nations were brought together to beautify the temples, the sacrifices and the games.”[cxvii]  Alberti’s tone is sardonic here, for people cannot have noticed the gods being influenced: the gods have not made return for the gifts/bribes/petitions that were sent to them before.  Fortunate for the gods that their influence is inferred by people when they have had a stroke of luck.

It is necessary to recall, at this point, acknowedgement of the extreme complexity of the relationship of author and reader in Momus.  A sign of the slipperiness of the text that Alberti has set up is that, at the same time as this passage is being taken as Alberti’s pointing to the folly of believing in the intervention of the gods, the story itself must have it that the gods are moved by the magnificence of the offering and are prompted to re-think their support for the plan to destroy the human race.

Hercules intercedes on behalf of humankind: he “…advised Jupiter to think carefully about … these offerings, which had been made with a sense of piety that equalled their expense…”[cxviii]  The iniquitous commerce of salvation is clearly to be identified here, for Hercules is not truly comparing like with like when he insists upon the equality of piety and expenditure.  The Parable of the Widow’s Mite shows the error.  While the argument would persuade Jupiter, salvation would go the the rich.

In Book IV of Momus, Gelastus and Charon are in conversation.  Gelastus is one of the personae of Alberti himself: he is a poor scholar who has attempted to be useful to his fellows and who has been repaid with scorn and indifference.  In death, he is too poor to pay the ferryman, Charon.  All he has are his prayers:  ‘“You’d have done better to hang yourself,” said Charon, “Rather than allow yourself to depend only on prayers.”’[cxix]  The reality, Charon is saying, is that, in the real world, prayers are useless without bribes.  In a burlesque inversion of epic journeys to the Underworld such as those of Aeneas and Dante, Charon wishes to explore the world of the living with Gelastus as his guide.  With his oar in his hand and his boat on his head, Charon is a parody of St Peter (or perhaps the Pope, as the Apostle’s successor).  The boat, or papal crown, stands for St Peter’s ability to deliver souls to the afterworld, as the boat, literally, is Charon’s means.  The oar is an instrument of guidance for Charon, as the staff or crozier is the sign of the shepherd in the Christian context.  Conversation between the two turns to the matter of money: are the poor (like Gelastus) untroubled enough by cupidity that they can be of service to their fellows (rather than racked by their own hunger)?  Gelastus sees his task as to assist his fellows.  Charon says, “Help carry my boat then.”  Gelastus responds that it is Charon’s job to do so, that is, provide the means to salvation.  Charon asks him to carry his oar at least.  Gelastus  says that in life he learned to wield the pen, not the oar.[cxx]  The fable concerns pastor and priest; the one carries the oar (staff/crook/crosier) and the other wears the crown of power.  In asking Gelastus to be his porter he represents the clergy shirking its task and leaving the faithful to salvation by dint of their own virtuous efforts.  Gelastus, himself, represents a third sort of aid, the person who shapes thought and understanding.  He must, by the nature of the structure of Alberti’s idea here, have a quasi-democratic role, for he provides people with the means to judge the world and their own actions, beyond the pale of episcopal or pastoral influence.

Alberti constructs an allegory of institutional religion where Momus, having transformed himself into ivy, has broken into the temple with the plan of raping the daughter of Virtue, Praise.[p,67]  The mother is asleep and the daughter tends her tresses in the reflective stone of the temple.  The reader recognises the allegorical representation of the sin of Vanity in what Momus spies.  Thus, while virtue is absent, praise sees itself reflected in the opulence of the temple.  The temple without virtue fosters self-praise –which is vanity. [this could perhaps go in the section, Architectural Impiety.]

Superstition and Idolatry

Alberti rejects religious practices that have evolved out of the self-interest of the clergy.  His core belief, stated by Lionardo Alberti and restated in the passages cited above, is that Nature is God’s work.  Delighting in it is in effect a prayer of thanksgiving.  It follows that, tacitly, he is arguing against presuming a relationship with God as opposed to Creation.  Super-naturalism engenders superstition, belief in un-natural events, sanctimoniousness, greed etc.  Such a position must carry with it a rejection of priesthood, as the special path of access to God and the saints. [get See the note in the Nicholas piece that follows those above from Opera inedita]  Only the pastor survives.  It becomes necessary to conceive that Alberti was in conflict, secretly if not publicly, with the Church itself.  In that case, of course, it is also likely that he was not an isolated voice –though he was a softly-spoken one.  Lorenzo Valla comes to mind as a more voluble critic.

Alberti was very alert to superstition and was especially critical of the cynical encouragement of false belief.  He encapsulates his thoughts in the story of Oenops, in Momus.  Alberti points to superstitious belief and denounces it as he has already denounced (and as he would continue to do in Momus) petition.[cxxi]  Oenops prays to be saved from brigands who have captured him and taken him to the cave where Stupor has stashed his statue.  The brigands, when they see the statue by torchlight, take it for the god himself (whom they imitate –ironically, another pious practice- by enacting stupor) and try to escape.  Oenops attributes his deliverance to the gods and abandons his previously firmly-held atheism.  A complicated sequence of events has unfolded here, and it originated with the gods; but Oenops’ reasoning does not follow that path of causation.  Alberti’s joke is that there is no connection between Oenops’ prayer and his deliverance.  When the newly-converted Oenops arrives at the theatre, where the real gods have taken the places of their statues, another farcical passage of action ensues, one in which he prevents the desecration of what he believes to be statues of the gods, when he is actually preventing a blasphemy. 

A similar muddle-headedness around the matter of the gods’ mercy and salvation is revealed by the narrator of the Intercenale ‘Naufragio’.  Of a complement of three hundred aboard ship, all but three have perished in the storm.  The first-person narrator argues with himself.  The gods have not saved the three only for them to perish now: ‘…we survive to bear witness to their kindness.’[cxxii]  Alberti surely intends the audience to note the narrator’s missing codicil to this statement.  The gods’ inability or unwillingness to save the two-hundred-and-ninety-seven or so are to go unwitnessed.  That is, the gods’ cruelty or impotence goes unreported.  Back in Momus, Alberti next turns the situation on its head.  Oenops, in the temple, where the real gods are disguising themselves as statues, has an argument with the slave who insists that the gods are not present in their images and who desecrates the statues/gods cheerfully.  Stupor explains the paradoxical  nature of the situation.[cxxiii]  Alberti remarked upon the oddity of location being connected to the efficacy of idols in De re aedificatoria.[cxxiv]

The passage in De re aedificatoria, cited above, containing the passage of frank, and surprising, exasperation with the reclusive conduct of the higher clergy also seems to tie in with idolatry.  Part of it may be repeated:

There followed the practice of our own times, which I only wish some man of gravity would think fit to reform. I say this with all due respect to our bishops, who, to preserve their dignity, allow the people to see them scarcely once in the year of festivals, yet so stuff everything with altars, and even … I shall say no more.[cxxv] 

Alberti bites his tongue.  What could be worse than an excess of altars?  Does Alberti intend the reader to attempt to finish the phrase?  If so, the reader will surely think that idols might be what is meant.  Alberti seems to be implying that, where the good example and the spirit are absent – where bishops are absent – only mumbo-jumbo can be present.  As is clear from the episode involving Stupor and the other gods in Momus, Alberti was alert to the problem of idolatry.  Where there was imagery, there God was emphatically absent, in Alberti’s view.  But stimulation of the moral imagination was most dramatically present.  The faithful person, like the observer of the historia, is made morally responsible: it is out of his own goodness of heart that he rejoices and weeps for others.  The idea that the virtù of God should exist in the material representation is, for Alberti, ridiculous.

There is also reason to believe that he took a dim view of relic cults.  Stefano Borsi notes that Alberti’s Vita Potitii, his biography of the young martyr saint, was useless for conventional religious purposes.  It lacked vital data for hagiographers and relic-worshippers in that places and dates were missing from the account.  How to establish a cult when a saint’s day could not be established and where no specific site was hallowed by the saint’s erstwhile presence?  Perhaps Alberti intended to thwart such a piety.[cxxvi]

Afterlife and Atheism

What is noteworthy about Lionardo’s confession of faith is that it is not soured by disdain for the world as imperfect in comparison with another superior and eternal one.  That other world seems to be beyond Alberti’s curiosity and possibly belief.

Denouncing petition and idolatry, Alberti, in Momus, goes a further, astounding step in his subversion.  He tells of how Hercules, not by deeds but by bubble reputation for them, is taken up to heaven to be made an immortal.[cxxvii]  It is Rumor (the monstrous product of Momus’ rape of Praise in the temple – the fabric that had readily lent itself to be host to the clinging insinuation of bad faith, bile, contumely etc. that Momus, transformed into ivy, had exploited), on the prompting of Fortune, the opponent of Virtue, who carries Hercules to heaven.  The consequence of human beings’ subsequent belief that they can expect heaven and immortality is depicted.  The implication of the narrative at this point is that, in reality, there is no undoing mortality.  The reader is brought to a halt, for it would be astonishing if this was Alberti’s thinking.

In the story, contention, war, blood-letting proceed from the belief that mortality is escapable.[cxxviii]  Such sanguinary disputes around the matter of the passage of mortals to immortality clearly represent religious controversies, whereby heresy is imputed to whoever disagrees with the claimant to orthodoxy.  In addition, an extreme of anti-clericalism is expressed.  If Rumour gives Hercules flight to heaven, she is to be co-opted by others, who must be driven not by truth but by ambition: ‘…as long as some from ambition,’ says Momus, ‘Try to seize Rumor, while others from envy try to stop them, they will struggle with fire and sword and with their very lives.’ ‘…dum hi per ambitionem Famam occupasse, hi contra per invidiam occupantes interpellasse, ferro, igni, vitaque certabunt.’[cxxix] 

But before a consideration of the consequence of belief in an afterlife, Alberti’s text reads as a questioning of the doctrine itself.  His identification of duration as the only characteristic of God that mortals can be sure of, and therefore the essential contrast between God and Man consisting in their respective immortality and mortality, also carries the thought.[cxxx]  Alberti has Virtue placing the flame of immortality upon her altar.[cxxxi] At the same time, though, he says that it is a story.  An alternative is that the immortality of the earthly consists in the fame or good report of a virtuous mortal.  If the event of Hercules’ apotheosis has disastrous consequences within a fiction, the doctrine in the world itself can lead to no better outcome.  The Christian parallel is inescapable.  Christ’s case and that of Hercules are so close as to be indistinguishable within the context of the allegory.  Hercules had gone about doing his virtuous works until corrupted by Fortune (the goddess who arranged his apotheosis through the flight of Rumor).  The parallel must be that Christ’s ministry is to be distinguished from his death and resurrection: the one is true, and the other, not.  It follows that there is no victory over death for humans.  By this implicit argument, Alberti points out, it seems, another instance of self-interest disguising itself as religion.  Alberti’s position seems close to Unitarianism and to have connections with Arianism.  Without petition and an afterlife to seek, the Christian religion is going to be much-reduced in its scope.  It is difficult to think that the institution is not the object of Alberti’s heretical assault here. 

In Book II, within the narrative, Momus is to be found taking the opposite position from the one he adopted when cast down to Earth in Book I.  Now, he presents himself (admittedly at the banquet of Hercules on Olympus, a narrative location where the gods cannot not exist) as the one who argues against the atheists.  He refers to arguments for and against the gods’ existence.  If Momus were simply a fantastical tale – pure narrative – that did not impinge through simile and suggestion upon the real world of his fifteenth-century readership, an encounter with atheistical views would be unproblematic.  But it is astounding that the atheistic position could be referred to at all for the reader who could think that the text is applicable to Christianity and contemporary political and social circumstances.  Alberti was surely addressing such an audience, one for which atheism was a possibility.  “At first there existed among them (men) two opinions about the gods…”  These can only have been yes and no.  Thereafter, ideas on the subject multiplied.  We are in indirect speech within indirect speech (Momus’s voice) as the text says, “Others did not believe the gods existed … but for their own sakes they still wanted the belief to be common, so that they would be held in awe and so that they could use the fear of the gods to fortify and render impregnable their arms, their camps and their empires. [The metaphor of castle and camp for monastery and church has been discussed above].  To this view they added the practice of pretending to be interpreters of the gods, inventing vain fictions to suggest that they were holding lofty exchanges with nymphs, tutelary spirits and even with important gods.’[cxxxii] Alberti is not just working himself up into disdain of the ancients, though it is true that he rehearses views that ancient materialism and sophism would recognise.  The exercise would not be worth the passion if only ancient philosophies were in his sights.  No, he is denouncing, implicitly, a modern priesthood.  There are plently of instances throughout his writings – some appear above – of Alberti’s anti-clericalism.  Momus prefaces his reporting of a long speech by a sophist with a denunciation of him.  But when we read the sophist’s speech, we must agree with much of its argument about the abjectness of the human condition and about how the gods, if they exist, must be its causes (outside of the narrative, there is the other possibility – the one that the fictional philosophers are able to believe – that the gods do not exist).  If the gods are the causes of our suffering, why should we think ourselves their children?  It is essentially a restating of Epicurus’ argument against the existence of the gods.  For example, why do not the gods distribute their blessings discriminatingly – to the deserving?  Why do they inflict pain and suffering with equal indifference upon their children?  The necessities of life are, indeed, supplied, but animals as much as humans are beneficiaries of this largesse.  And so on.  The speaker concludes, “Either the gods do not exist at all, or if they do exist, they are always hostile to wretched mortals, actively seeking to do us harm.”[cxxxiii]  Epicurus and David Hume would be in agreement. Indeed, Momus’s philosopher was no sophist. Therefore, we should do away with useless rites and superstitious practices.  Momus reports his response to this speech: he advised the mortals to play safe and believe in the gods.  Pascal, famously, also took the pragmatic option.  Momus must know that this statement represents no refutation at all of the argument.  The reader is not to reject the argument as brusquely as it is done in the narrative.  Indeed, within the narrative, the mortals reject Momus’ advice and, as Momus has all the while intended, accepts the ‘sophist’s’.  There is heavy irony in Momus’s characterisation of the argument as boastful and ostentatious and in his observation that Jupiter – ‘the gentlest of all gods’ (‘omnium mitissimus’) – would, if he had been present at the delivery of the speech, have hurled his ‘thunderbolt at the whole criminal class of literati’.[cxxxiv]  Momus then beseeches Jupiter’s indulgence of humankind in its folly, confident that his weedling tone will be insufficient to disarm the god’s wrath.

Hercules produces the counter-argument: humankind should be applauded by the gods, not smitten by them.  He describes philosophers constructing systems of thought whereby the existence of the gods is proved.  The honour that the gods receive, then, is owing to the philosophers who are responsible for ‘the performance of religious ceremonies and for the cultivation of piety, holiness and virtue.’[cxxxv]  However, what Alberti has done here is show that the gods’ existence is not proved by the philosophers’ labours, for the gods have been entirely passive throughout.  That is, they are transcendental.  They have done nothing to confirm the philosophers.  Alberti’s narrative assumes the gods; but if there were no narrative, the arguments of the philosophers would not amount to proof of the gods’ existence.  Concluding his speech, Hercules conflates moral philosophical thinking with speculative theology.

They [the philosophers] have tested everything and made publicly available whatever contributes to human use and need and to living well and blessedly; whatever makes for ease and tranquillity; whatever conduces to security, embellishment and honor of public and private affairs; and whatever befits the knowledge and fear of the gods, and the observance of religion!’[cxxxvi]

The reader will not object to the first moral-philosophical project.  But he can not take the second theological one so positively.

Juno, as the goddess most crazed with the desire to build, using the materials supplied by petitioners on earth, is very easy to interpret in an anti-clerical spirit.  If Luther had read Momus, he would have found encouragement to focus his thoughts on the evil of indulgences.  Alberti’s basic idea is that the Church does not have sound moral foundations if their raw material is petition.

After the collapse of Juno’s arch, Jupiter is exasperated.  Gods and men both are galling him with their importunings.  He makes a speech which, in fact, contradicts that of the sophist: it is not the fault of the gods that human life is mean, nasty, brutish and short – “Man is the plague of man.”[cxxxvii]  What the reader can take from this, however, is confirmation of one side of the sophist’s argument; either the gods do not care, or else they hate human beings.  Jupiter’s speech says, in effect, that they do not care.  If, then, the gods do not intervene in human life, their existence cannot be proved by men.  With what man has to work with, atheism  – disbelief in a divine force outside of nature – is a reasonable position.

In Book III, Jupiter goes down to earth in order to discover the thoughts of the philosophers.  In casting Jupiter as a god ignorant about Man, Alberti points to a divinity who is not privy to the mind and heart of Man.  Human belief in divine omniscience and omnipresence is error, folly or self-deceit. Jupiter disguises himself; but anyone who looks closely enough at him will see his flame of divinity.  None does, though Jupiter goes away with the erroneous idea that they do.  The joke is that, given humankind’s ability to misconstrue, the gods lack the power to reveal themselves.  Revelation itself must be the construct of human misunderstanding (though, cunningly, Alberti has denied true revelation from within a theist’s position and has protected himself against the charge of atheism).

If Alberti is a critic of the Church and veers towards doubt, even atheism, how, in good conscience, can he keep silent?  In Book IV, Charon asks Gelastus if he thinks that the statues (as he thinks) of the gods, gathered together as they are in the theatre, are deserving of respect.  Gelastus replies, “If I was alone perhaps I’d laugh, but if there were many others present I would revere them.”[cxxxviii]  Here, he reiterates a point made by Cicero in De natura deorum; the gods’ non-existence might be discussed, but out of sight of the public.[cxxxix]  Is Alberti saying that he would defer to the majority?  He does seem to be saying that, for the advantages for society at large of religion, the price of hypocrisy is worth paying.  Galileo could take some heart from Alberti’s position.  Of course, this advantage only pertains so long as the clergy do not descend into their habitual venality.

When, at last, Jupiter picks up Momus’s notebooks and reads them, he finds instruction in moderation.  Among them is this: “He [the prince] will permit himself to be thought worthy of prayers, and he will bear calmly the importunities of the humble, just as he wants his own pride to be tolerated by his inferiors.”[cxl]  He will not, presumably, answer prayers.  Book IV is more clearly about the prince than the other books; so Jupiter is ambiguously god and prince.  Alberti would use the idea of the prince in the context of Church and State, but, at the end, the advice seems to point more towards the secular.

A Curtailed Piety and Liturgy

The importance of religion is clear to see from much of Alberti’s writings.  However, there are elements of the dogma and parts of the devotion that go unmentioned.  When Alberti’s critical attitude to the clergy and when some of the forms of piety by which they set great store are taken into account, the suspicion must be that his Christianity was of the cherry-picked variety.  There seems to be no virgin birth, no incarnation; there are no miracles.  Except of Virtue and her attendants, there is no revelation, and even that is embedded in the fiction to such a degree that it is not possible to be sure that it is more than allegorical.  There was the sacrifice – sacrificio -but, despite his labours on the half-scale version of the Holy Sepulchre in the Rucellai Chapel of San Pancrazio in Florence, he does not go on to say that the stone moved.

If there is some doubt about how much of Christian dogma survived in Alberti’s own religious thinking, Christ’s historical existence did not come into question.  The centre of his specifically Christian piety was a matter of accepted historical record, the sacrificio, mentioned frequently and devoutly in his writings.  Giannozzo Alberti and Angelo Pandolfini, two moral paragons, attend frequently.  In light of the present discussion, it would have to be argued that his devotion was to Christ’s act of self-sacrifice in the world; that the mass was an act of remembrance, not the occasion of a miracle of divine intervention.  The celebrant is meditating upon the Crucifixion and, since the altar table is involved, is following the instruction issued at the Last Supper.  In other words, Alberti’s piety was an exercise of historical imagination, a ‘weeping with the weeping’ and an acknowledgement of self-sacrifice as the greatest moral act.  Throughout his writings he praises those who will give their goods, their efforts and even their lives for their fellows.[cxli]

The ability to recognise virtuous conduct and to empathise are, as has been seen, gifts universally distributed.  The Church that Alberti conceived for true piety had the act and spirit of congregation at its core.   A religious rebirth was required; the early Christian simplicity was to be renewed.[cxlii]  It would be composed around universal humanity rather than a race divided by education, wealth, strength and the contentious instinct.

A passage in De iciarchia, wittingly or unwittingly, shows Alberti’s humanist Christianity.  He considers virtues human motives and their reward: ‘Rursus l’omo bono gode nel far bene, dilettagli il pensare alle cose oneste, dassi alle cose molto lodate, falle con ottima speranza di felice successo col favor degli omini e ancor di Dio, a cui piace le cose ben fatte, e acquistane premio incomparabile, cioè gloria e immortal fama.’[cxliii]  Immortal fame, and perhaps glory too, continue on earth and not in heaven.  The phrase ‘e ancor di Dio’ and perhaps also ‘a cui piace le cose ben fatte’ are therefore functionally parenthetical.

In view of Alberti’s religious scepticism, his anti-clericalism and his disapproval of various pious practices, it is possible to outline a reconstructed liturgy that he had in mind.  The mass and probably the sermon comprised the piety – the one an act of communal acknowledgement of Christ’s sacrifice and the other a schooling in how to live companionably in society, inspired by the greatest example.  So clear is Alberti’s congregational idea and so much reduced and simplified must be, as a consequence, the functional provisons of his ideal church, so much are we perplexed by the churches of S. Francesco at Rimini and SS. Annunziata.[cxliv]  The rotundas planned for the east end in both cases would not admit the common faithful.  However, though none expresses it so well as S. Martino a Gangalandi at Lastra a Signa, near Florence – the most perfect and reduced of his church  buildings, as well as the most ancient in its formal reference- the congregational idea is to be found frequently.[cxlv]  In fact, it is tempting to suggest that, in cases where it is especially eloquently stated, Alberti’s presence as designer/advisor might be proposed.

The actual church building that seems, for him, to have been exemplary as a moral place was Florence Cathedral.  He visited it several times in his writings.  His delight is clear from his Prologue to Della Pittura, where Brunelleschi’s dome is singled out for especial praise, and from the passage in Profugiorum ab aerumna, already quoted, where Agnolo Pandolfini describes it in terms of Spring.[cxlvi]  He gathered together his affirmative feelings in what must be called an act of theatre when, on 22^nd October 1441, acting together with Piero de’Medici, he co-opted the cathedral as the venue for the poetry competition that he organised, the Certame Coronario.  The theme of the poems was to be la vera amicizia.  That dome that had embraced the entire Tuscan people in the Prologue was now a crown about the heads of the celebrants of friendship, a universal value – for the poems were to be in the vernacular.  Ambrogio Traversari’s public lectures on Dante held in the Cathedral struck a similar social and patriotic note.  In 1441, a platform was erected beneath the dome and a congregation including civic and curial representatives assembled.  The competition’s significance  is usually thought to have been principally as an exercise in beating the drum for the vulgar tongue.  Here, the intrinsic piety of the ‘church service’ will be considered.  Alberti’s own poem must have drawn the audience’s attention to the moral action of the dome:

Dite, o mortali, che sì fulgente corona

poneste in mezo, che pur mirando volete?

Forse l’amicitia, qual col celeste Tonante

tra li celicoli è con maiestate locata,

ma pur sollicita non raro scende l’olimpo

sol se subsidio darci, se comodo possa,

non vien nota mai, non vien composta temendo

l’invidi contra lei scelerata gente nimica.

In tempo et luogo veggo che grato sarebbe

a chi qui mira manifesto poterla vedere,

s’oggi scendesse qui dentro accolta vedreste

sì la sua effigie et gesti, sì tutta la forma.

Dunque voi che qui venerate su’ alma corona

leggete i miei monimenti et presto saravvi

l’inclita forma sua molto notissima, donde

cauti amerete.  Così sarete beati.[cxlvii]

‘Tell us, O mortals, with this shining crown set in our midst, what for its praiseworthiness do you wish to possess?  Perhaps Friendship, placed in majesty with the heavenly thunderer among his angels, though frequently invoked, comes down from Olympus only if She has succour to bring us, if She can do so obligingly, [but] never makes herself known, never reveals herself fully, whilst in fear of the envy against her of wicked and hostile humankind.  In time and space I see how welcome it would be to this admiring assembly to be able to see her, if today she should descend right here, received among us, both her image and her actions, indeed her complete form.  So, you who venerate her spiritual crown, read my injunctions and soon her glorious form will be fully before you, wherefore you will love [?] in all proper measure.  In this way you will be blessed.’

The prize was to be a golden laurel crown.  It is necessary to imagine Alberti, as he recited his poem, gesturing towards that crown and then raising his arm aloft. The shining coronet above the gathering where God in glory was accompanied by amicizia and glimpses of his angel-retinue was also a description of the great dome, its oculus at the summit and the oculi of the drum.

The Certame Coronario took place one hundred years after Petrarch’s coronation at the Capitol in Rome (though unfortunately not on the same day, for Petrarch was crowned on Easter Day).[cxlviii]  Alberti’s sonnet contains a clear evocation of the poet and that earlier occasion.  Wishing to have the crown was also wishing to have the laurel in the context of a gathering of poets.  The admirable nature of the crown (‘che pur mirando volete’) perhaps put the congregation in mind of the beginning of Petrarch’s Oration on the occasion of his coronation.  He took as his text the line from Virgil’s third Georgic: ‘Sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis raptat amor.’  A sweet love draws me on the lonely quest of Parnassus.  Whoever would make the arduous ascent of Parnassus must love what he seeks: ‘quisquis enim per ardua deserta Parnasi cupit ascendere necesse habet amare quod cupit.’[cxlix] 

There is an air of didacticism in Alberti’s poem.  He has conceived the cathedral and especially the centrally-focussed part beneath the dome as in singular architectural concordance with the principle around which the event assembled itself.  The whole action and scenario combined in what, we might suggest, was Alberti’s attempt to make an addition to the liturgy.[cl]  The poets took the place of the clergy to raise hymns in praise of the human bond and to inspire the audience to make fellowship the lamp of their lives.  The Certame Coronario was surely produced in order to realise afresh the liturgy of the early Christians when, inspired to amicizia about the common table, they were fired to return to their daily lives in the spirit of charity.[cli]  Again, the idea of a pentecostal event suggests itself.

This was radical theatre to a remarkable degree.  In what it did not include, it carried an implicit message of rejection of the established liturgy.  Alberti inserts, in place of divine intervention, a mere simile and the subjunctive voice.  His implication is clearly that the victory belongs to the under-dog.  The emotion of those who can imagine the crown is not less heightened than that of those who assert the reality of the Divine Presence.  In fact, the inspiring and instructing drama has been accessible without belief or faith being required of the witnesses.  Alberti grounds the moral life, through the liturgy of the Certame Coronario, beyond the reach of supernaturalism.  He seems to have aimed at nothing short of the invasion of the sanctum of the clergy and the reframing of the functions of the Christian Church.

Considered in this way, the Certame Coronario was surely intended to be a recurring occasion.  What were required were new poets; voices eager to dedicate themselves anew to the articulation of the meaning and affect of amicizia.  Where were they to come from?  The answer must be, from the constituency of the virtuous.  If the clergy would participate, it would not be ex officio.  Alberti would expect them to emerge, no doubt, from the class of which he was a member, that of humanist scholars.  Petrarch, in his oration, quoting Cicero, equates poets with saints.[clii]  And, as Petrarch sees his own coronation as the beginning of a revived tradition, Alberti –it can be suggested- sees the poets’ liturgy as the beginning of a revived early-Christian spirit.

The Certame Coronario was a project of quite astounding intrepidity and ambition.  It stands as Alberti’s attempt to fashion a Christian Renaissance.  If undoing the depredations of the barbarians demanded the excavation and return to light of the works of the ancient Romans, the recovery of the values of the early Christian Church required the removal of the centuries’ accretions of self-seeking piety and redundant ritual.

Virtue was to be social and congregational.  For example, what could seem a casual remark to drive on the narrative in Momus in fact makes the point emphatically.  As has been seen, the goddess, Virtue, had been invited by the rich and powerful to receive their private hospitality.  However, she rejected their offers, saying that, instead, ‘…she had no plans to spend the night anywhere other then in the temple’, that is, the place of public hospitality.[cliii] Translated into prosaic terms, the idea is that doing good is not to happen in a dedicated place.  The temple is incidental.  In De familia, Book III, Giannozzo Alberti, who has spent the morning explaining good housekeeping to the young Alberti and now learns that the person whom he had come specifically to speak with will be unavailable, regrets that he has missed his customary church attendance.  Lionardo Alberti observes, ‘Stimate, Giannozzo, questo vostro officio di pietà  essere gratissimo a Dio non meno che se fossi stato al sacrificio, avendoci insegnato tante buone e satissime cose.’[cliv]

In early Christian times, people came together in amicizia.  The church building as emblem of amicizia is to be derived from the simile that Avodardo Alberti elaborates in Book IV of De familia:

But just as one would not say that a basilica or temple was structurally complete if it lacked a roof to protect those attending mass from sun and rain, or, on the one hand, walls to keep out the wind and, on the other, to close it off from other public and profane places, or perhaps again lacking its appropriate fitments – the building would be neither finished nor whole – so one would never say that friendship was perfect and complete, if it should be wanting in any of its [own] parts.  It is not true friendship if there is not good faith and firm and pure fellow-feeling so constituted that it excludes and removes all suspicion and disaffection to disturb in any way their sweet peace and unity.  Nor would I consider friendship complete which was not full of the courtesies of virtue and good manners.  As well as these points, who can doubt that benevolence on its own is not sufficient if it is not recognised and exchanged.[clv]

The roof signifies the Necessary, or firmitas, in Alberti’s theory of architecture.  The walls, which partition buildings in terms of function, are Useful, and are a part of commoditas.  The parts that are specific to the building as a temple constitute its virtù or definition.  These belong in the categories of pulchritudo or, insofar as they are enrichments of structure and function, venustas.  Corresponding with these parts of the temple are those of amicizia – benevolence, familiar intercourse and virtue.

Alberti’s ideal is realised most closely in his design for Sant’ Andrea in Mantua.  Its architectural  form is the hall (for the present cruciform east end was not part of Alberti’s plan), in which  the visibility of the action at the altar is guaranteed.  The cunning of the structural scheme allows the obstruction of columns to be avoided.  Incidentally, of course, it also creates chapels, which talk of the private or selective salvation to which Alberti was opposed.  But it is important to remember that, as well as its congregational function of housing and displaying the relic of the Blood of Christ, the church would have been conceived in 1470, when Alberti offered his design to Lodovico Gonzaga, as housing a monastic community.[clvi]  S. Sebastiano was also designed with a view to the visibility of relics, if the piazza before it is recognised as a part of the religious space.  The loggia, raised above street level, is punctuated by openings in which clergy can place themselves to make a fine altarpiece-like composition.[clvii]  The assembled faithful in the piazza are able to see the display of the relics.  A raised podium at the east end of S. Andrea would have made the assembly of clergy and the display of the relic more effective.  In fact, the arrangement at S. Sebastiano is functionally so similar to that at S. Marco and in the Benediction Loggia of Old St Peter’s in Rome, and both loggias there so effectively remedy the problem of the invisibility of the clergy that Alberti reprehended in De re aedificatoria that, if he was not involved in their creation, he must have applauded their conception.[perhaps remove the foregoing back as far as Adovardo’s quote to another place]

Finally, there is reason to believe that Alberti was a heretic in an unambiguous way – or at any rate was an occasional one, for it is necessary to acknowledge that throught his writings are expressions of faith and signs of piety.  The evidence is to be found in De familia.  When listing those things that are truly the property of the individual, his interlocutor, Giannozzo Alberti, includes, along with the physical body and the time given to the person on earth, the soul.  The soul, he declares, is the supreme judge of moral action: ‘…commandògli (the body) la natura mai patisse ubidire ad altri che all’anima propria.’[clviii]  Nature commands the body to obey only the soul that inhabits it.  To give individual conscience such authority is remarkable for, implicitly, it is to deny authority to the powers that traditionally and habitually claimed it.  Specifically, obedience could not be commanded by the Church.  As has been seen, there must be suspicion that St Francis ‘cut a deal’.  Two of the three Franciscan vows make sense.  Poverty and chastity belong to an imitatio christi.  Obedience does not.  Poverty could only be suffered by the institution so long as it was counterbalanced by obedience. [the following possibly to be included]  Now, a measure of the depth of this somewhat Observant heresy that Alberti seems to favour is that Giannozzo’s argument was repeated – or at any rate the corollary of it – more than three hundred years later, with disastrous consequences for the writer.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Emile, included ‘The Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Priest’, and was accused of heresy.  As a result, he was forced into exile.  What outraged orthodox religious opinion was the Savoyard priest’s insistence upon the primacy of conscience: ‘Man … is free to act.’[clix]  Like Alberti’s, it is a stunningly bald statement.  The Priest’s, like Giannozzo’s, obedience is to his conscience in following Nature.  He states that ‘…we judge our own actions … and it is this principle that I call conscience.’[clx]  If the point should carry, the consequences for the Church as an instrument of political control are clear to see.  Alberti was personally lucky that the authorities read De familia less vigilantly than they did Rousseau’s Emile.  The moral and social reform that his thought anticipated remained, perhaps disappointingly, only a covert possibility.

For Alberti, the onus was on the religion to conform with facts observable in the world, not the other way about.  That was perhaps the nub of the heresy.  And the crucial observation was one that he restated several times.  Human beings stand in need of the assistance of others.  Here was a Ciceronian truism.  No Christian would disagree.  Where then is the heresy?  It is in the blatancy and prominence of the fact, standing like the proverbial elephant in the sittingroom.[The discussion here and below appears also at other suitable points.  I must decide which is best.]

He wrote, in De iciarchia, ‘… dal primo ingresso a questa luce sino all’ultimo fine sempre all’omo sta necessita chiedere aiuto dagli altri omini…’  with the consequence that,  ‘[Ma] furono le citta constituite forse a caso, e non per altra ragione che sola per vivere con sufficienza e commodita insieme.’[clxi]  Polytropos says to Neophronus in the Intercenale ‘Defunctus’: ‘[Since] men were created for men’s sake…’[clxii]  Again, in the Intercenales, this time Annuli, he writes that, ‘…everyone needs a bond with others to survive.’[clxiii]  Giannozzo , in De familia, states the point in typically down-to-earth terms: ’credete a me, niuno puo durare in alcuna buona fortuna senza spalle e mano degli altri uomini.’[clxiv] A free translation would be that no one can continue in a satisfactory condition but thanks to the sweat and skill of others.  Lionardo uses more elevated language for a more extensive consideration of the point:

Rather, Nature wished that where I should be deficient, there you would be sufficient, and in that respect in which you were deficient, the sufficiency would be with someone else.  And why is this?  In order that I should have need of you, you of that other, and he of another again, and that other of me; and so that this needfulness, one man of another, be the cause and the bond to preserve ourselves together in public friendship and cooperation.  And perhaps it was this necessary condition that was the origin and principle establishing republics.  Instead of what I said above, this may, indeed, have been the source and beginning of republics, and their constitution under law… [rather than]  fire and water being the occasion, among men, of such an close-bound society of mortals, under law, reason and custom.’[clxv] 

Lionardo here offers a refinement upon Vitruvius’s account of the origins of society in man’s discovery of fire.[perhaps include Nature’s provision in accordance with the fact of the individual human life being unsustainable without consanguinity.[clxvi]]  The ineluctable fact is the human being’s need for human assistance to survive.  As need, it is Necessary, not contingent.  Thus whatever assists participates in Nature’s will.  The Divine Will, as far as humans are concerned, is indistinguishable from that of Nature.  Alberti, with this thought, is able to look at religious beliefs and practices, and distinguish those that help sustain human existence from those that do not.  The latter, without the evident principle of amicizia, must be inimical to human welfare, and a denial of God and Nature.

In the passages celebrating nature, Spring, fecundity, virtue and plentitude prevail.  However, optimism for Alberti was half of his dialectic.  He was also the cynic.  The variety of nature included the scorpion and all those other creatures that sting and bite.  Momus was their inventor.

On Nature, the creator:  ‘Fece la natura, cioe Idio, l’uomo composto parte celeste e divino…’ (De familia).  In De re IX, 5: Naturam optimam formarum arteficem sibi fore imitandam’  In Della pittura,  ‘natura’ is ‘maravigliosa artefice delle cose…’

Scepticism.  De iciarchia (252] ‘Dio ama, aiuta, accresce quelli chi studiano simigliarsi a Lui con quello che a lui sia concesso.’  One is to recognise modestly the limited power of one’s means.  The thinking of the Brotherhood of the Common Life seems to be present here.

Watkins, Della famiglia, p.112: ‘ Marriage was therefore instituted by nature, our most excellent and divine teacher in all things…’ Romano, tenenti, Fyrlan, p.129. l.841-83: Cosi adunque fu il coniugio instituto dalla natura ottima e divina maestra di tutte le cose…’

[It is indeed a general humorous theme.   Raphael …   It survived into the eighteenth century, in the form of the man-servant in the final scene of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode.  The rake was reduced to just such a state of idiocy in the scene, in The Rake’s Progress, where he was arrested for debt at St James’s.  It will have survived since then.]

*[Francesco Alberti (Lirici Toscani del Quattrocento a cura di Antonio Lanza) is pretty close to Leon Battista on lots of matters.  Selfish piety is the theme of his sonnet (LXI).  The metaphor is commercial.  Christ has left in pawn his precepts and examples with his disciples, and we may redeem them.  Piety without works is damnable: L’ore sanza essercizio son perdute… ‘(p.97, Vol.I)  If there will be religious conduct, what it seeks is the general good in this world.]

Anti-clericalism  It must be a piss-take in Book.V, 6, where Alberti likens the cloister to the soldiers’ camp, describing the former as warriors in the battle of virtue and vice. (p.359). he says he has dealt with the subject in Pontifex. Read.

Have a look at V, 7 too. The opposition is between open and closed. Is he saying that closed is useless, and the moral duties of the open are no different from those of virtuous human beings in general?  The connection between  studia bonarum artium and hominum rebus is explicit. The logic of what he says and the structural logic don’t seem quite to coincide.

A dismissive attitude to closed monasticism is to be discovered with his statement that Pontificis castra quidem sunt claustra (361). He has already said (V, 3 p.349), likening the fortress to a soldier – Ac mihi quidem uti eius militis fortitudo non probatur, qui de se nihilo plus praestet, quam at insultantem hostem obdurate perferat, sic et ab arce expectandum poto, ut non modo substinere lacessentem, verum et compescere impetentes valeat. A monastery/camp that had no offensive capability – that is, was incapable of service – would seem to be worthy of disdain.

Virtue and Truth are what are needed for the happy life. Tranquillity of mind and freedom from material concerns are required. The monastry supplies these. But Alberti goes on immediately to talk of the duty of virtue (to engage with the world and its sufferings). He also talks elsewhere (Della famiglia and Profugiorum for example) about tranquillita dell’anima, and his heroes are

Lionardo says, ‘…l’amicizia sta utilissima a’ poveri, gratissima a’ fortunati, commoda a’ ricchi, necessaria alle famiglie, a’ principati, alle republice, in ogni età, in ogni vita, in ogni stato.’[clxvii]

Alberti wrote, ‘…se così descriverremo l’amicizia essere una coniunzione d’animi, fra’ quali ogni loro cosa e divina e umana sia comune, contrario diremo dell’ inimicizia che sia contrarietà disiunta d’animi e voleri in qualunque cosa.’[clxviii]

Alberti advises against unquestioning faith.  He has Apollo warn Jupiter by reference of the case of Pythagoras.  But it’s so transferrable as to be striking. ‘Pythagoras acquired so much authority that his followers didn’t care whether what he said was true or false, but they assented to everything, did not dare deny anything and wouldn’t disbelieve anything he said.  In the end, they wanted to take even the silliest doctrines as certain and proven, so that even when he claimed that he had come back from the underworld they swore that his claims were true (Momus, III. §57, pp.256/57:  ‘Pythagoras auctoritate assecutus est ut quae diceret vera an falsa essent sui nihil curarent, Omnia assentirentur, nihil auderent negare, nihil non crederent: denique vel ineptissima etiam vellent heberi pro certis et testatis apud ceteros, ut etiam cum se ab inferis esse reducem praedicaret iutarent vera praedicere.’)  His denunciation of untested belief must have universal application. 

Alberti’s anti-clericalism is expressed particularly directly in the voice of Piero Alberti recalling the court/cura of Pope John XXIII (Cossa).  The product of the Pope’s cupidity (a prevailing vice of the clergy) is a household at war with itself.  Giannozzo responds (in a role somewhat like that of Lionardo in Book III), summing up the consequences of seeking the friendship of the unvirtuous.

Pastors rather than priests; see Buto. IV, 349: E sono questi preti fatti come a lucerna, quale posta in terra a tutti fa lume, e in also elevate, quanto piú sale, tanto di sú piú rende inutile ombra.

Adovardo and Lionardo then discuss Piero’s speech.  Lionardo thinks that, rather than in narrative form, it had been composed as philosophical anatomisation.  Adovardo disagrees, taking the practice of the doctor as the best, when he returns the patient to good health and gives him the means to maintain it.  He takes the various medical theorists’ claims (of which, at a maximum, only one can be correct) and shows their redundancy to the case in hand.[I’ve perhaps got this wrong and Adovardo is only criticising  people who originate their practice in theory –when, of course, should the theory be wrong, so will be the practice.  ‘La virtu consiste in operarla…’ Check] The parallel with the priest and pastor is clear.  Virtu belongs to ministry  ‘L’amicizia si dice officio di virtu…’

---

[i] See for example, Mark Jarzombec, On Leon Battista Alberti: his literary and aesthetic theories, Cambridge, Mass./London, M.I.T. Press, 1989.

It belongs with our fallen condition. The opposite of dissembling is candour.  Honest dealing is the essense of friendship, or amicizia.  In our pre-lapsarian state, there was nothing to squabble over: we sought no advantage over our fellows, so our deceiving them brought no promise of advantage.  But, in the world where the means of survival are limited and where there must be winners and losers, contention must exist and equity seems impossible.  If they must deal, all must deal dishonestly.  Alberti seems to have had this understanding.  However, he did not see dissembling as a means of controlling our conduct to peaceful effect.  With a pessimism anticipating Rousseau’s, he traced disastrous consequences for the family, for society and for civilisation, in De Familia.

[ii] His caste of characters may be found, for example, in the Intercenales, short texts for recitation and discussion between courses at dinner.  There is Libripeta, the bookworm.  Lepidus is Alberti in cheerful mood, perhaps adopting for the occasion the philosophy of Democritus. A very obviously autobiographical persona is Philiponius in ‘Pupillus’ who experiences the same disappointments and rejections as did young Leon Battista himself.

[iii] Heterodox views on more than just the pharisiacal  niceties of theological hair-splitting were conceivable and perhaps existed at the time.  For example, according to Platina, Pope Paul II, in pursuing his enemies in the disbanded College of Abbreviators, had some imprisoned and accused of disbelieving in the immortality of the soul.  See Girolamo Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, p.412, Roma, Bardi Editore, 1971 (reprint of 1911 edition).  Alberti was himself a member of the College, though, as a friend of Leonardo Dati, Pietro Barbo’s (Paul II’s) secretary, he was not clearly located in the enemy camp.

[iv] Leon Battista Alberti, Momus, English translation by Sarah Knight, Latin text edited by Virginia Brown and Sarah Knight, The I Tatti Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass./London, 2003.  In the preface, Alberti advises the reader to recognise the gods as representations of moral principles.  They are not, then, just actors in colourful tales conjured in the folly of the pagan mind.  The text has the character of a roman à clef.  Its meaning in relation to architecture and to Roman Church politics is discussed by Stefano Borsi in Momus o del Principe: Leon Battista Alberti, I papi, il giubileo, Edizioni Polistampa, Firenze, 1999.  Eugenius IV and Nicholas V are rivals for the role of target of Alberti’s criticism in the scholarly literature.  The aim of the present discussion, however, is not so much to interpret Momus’ function as a satirical commentary upon the contemporary situation, as to seek out its underpinning religious views and to find corroboration in Alberti’s other writings. 

[v]Momus is a lesser-known Olympian god, son of Night. Alberti repeats Aesop and mimics the tone of Lucian’s True Story in telling of Momus’s criticism of the inventions of the gods for the newly-made world; a mockery that led to his expulsion.

[vi] Through the rape of Praise, the daughter of Virtue, he is the father of rumour: ‘vera falsis miscens’, ‘it often mixed falsehoods withg truth.’[76. P.72]

[vii] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, p.41/43, para 40: ‘Dea ut primum appulit ad terras, mirabile dictu quantum universa terrarum facies plausa laetitiaque gestiret!  Sino quid aurae, quid fontes, quid flumina, quid colles adventu deae exhilarati sint.  Videbas flores vel ipso praeduro ex silice erumpere praetereuntique deae late arridere et venerando acclinare, omnesque suavitatum delicias, ut odoratissimum id iter redderent, expromere.  Vidisses et canoras alites propter advolitantes circim applaudere pictis alis, modoque vocis deos hopites consalutare.’(p.40-42)

[viii]Cecil Grayson, Teogenio, in Opere Volgari, Vol.II, 1966, p. 57-8: ‘O Microtiro mio, quanto fu sempre da pregiare la dolce amicizia! […]  Ma sediamo, se cosi ti piace, fra questi mirti, luogo non meno delizioso che i vostri teatri e templi amplissimi e suntuosisimi.  Qui colonne fabricate dalla natura tante quante tu vedi albori ertissimi.  Qui sopra dal sole noi copre ombra lietissima di questi faggi e abeti, e atorno, dovunque te volgi, vedi mille perfettissimi colori di vari fiori intessuti fra el verde splendere in fra l’ombra, e vincere tanto lustro e chiarore del cielo; e a gratificarti suavissimi odori.  E poi la festività di questi quali tu in presenza vedi uccelletti con sue piume dipintissimi e ornatissimi, a chi non dilettasse?  Bellissimi, che d’ora in ora vengono con nuovi canti lodano i cieli a salutarmi!’  The preference is expressed ffor the natural over the artificial.  Charon, in Book IV of Momus, expresses, several times, the same preference. He dispraises the theatre and praises instead the flower: ‘…shall I admire stones?  Everything about a flower is beautiful and pleasing.  In these man-made constructions, you won’t find anything wondrous apart from the wondrous extravagance of misplaces labour.’ (p.313, para 48) *(one wonders is he has S. Maria del Fiore in mind) (p….)[get]

[ix]Christine Smith, [get]1992, pp.5-6: ‘E certo questo tempio ha in sè grazia e maiestà: e quello ch’io spesso considerai, mi diletta ch’io veggo in questo tempio iunto insieme una gracilità vezzosa con una sodezza robusta e piena, tale che da una parte ogni suo membro pare posto ad amenità, e dall’altra parte compreendo che ogni cosa qui è fatta e offirmata a perpetuità.  Aggiugni che qui abita continuo la temperie, si può dire, della primavera; fuori vento, gelo, brina; qui entro socchiuso da’venti, qui tiepido aere e quiéto: fuori vampe estive e autunnali; qui entro temperatissimo refigerio.  E s’egli’è, come è dicono che le delizie sono quando a’nostri sensi aggiungono le cose quanto e quali le richiede la natura, chi dubiterà appellare questo tempio nido delle delizie?  Qui dovunque tu miri, vedi ogni parte esposte a giocondità e letizia; qui sempre odoratissimo; e, quel ch’io sopra tutto stimo, qui senti in queste voci al sacrificio, e in questi quali gli antichi chiamano misteri, una soavità maravigliosa.’ Grayson, II, Profugiorum ab aerumna, p.107. Smith discusses this passage extensively in the light of rhetorical models (pp.80-97).  She is interested principally in its aesthetic content, whereas present interest is mainly in its moral content and its particular imagery:

[x] Alberti keeps to the sequence in a passage praising the villa in Book III of De Familia. The speaker is Lionardo Alberti: ‘In Spring the farm gives you a multitude of delights –greenery, flowers, aromas, songs.’ Reneé Watkins, 1969, p.191: Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.244, l.1517-19

[xi]Reneé Watkins, 1969, p.134: ‘Ma sopra tutte lodo quella verissima et probatissima sententia di coloro, e quali dicono l’uomo essere creato per piacere a Dio, per riconoscere un primo et vero principio alle cose, ove si vegga tanta varietà, tanta dissimilitudine, bellezza et multitudine d’animali, di loro forme, stature, vestimenti et colori; per ancora lodare Iddio insieme con tutta l’universa natura, vedendo tante et si differentiate et si consonante armonie di voci, versi et canti in ciascuno animante concinni et soave…’ Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.162, l.1786-94.  Here, I use Watkins’ admirable translation.  There will be occasions below where I offer my own translation instead.  I do so in order to allow myself slightly more paraphrased readings of the passages. My translations are identifiable by my omission of the page references to Watkins.  The position stated here by Lionardo is an amalgamation of two that Alberti presents separately in Profugiorum ab aerumna, Bk.I.  Agnolo Pandolfini says, ‘Non premediterò io assiduo me essere nato non solo, come rispose Anassagora, a contemplare el cielo, le stelle e la universa natura, ma e ancora in prima, come affermava Lattanzio, per riconoscere e servire a Dio, quando servire a Dio non sia altro che darsi a favoreggiare e’ buoni e a mantenere giustizia?  (Grayson, II, p.122, l.15-20)

[xii] Leonis Baptistae Alberti, Opera Inedita et Pauca Separatim Impressa, curante Hieronymo Mancini, Florentiae, J.C. Sansoni, 1890, p.31

[xiii] Orlandi, L’Architettura, VI, 2, p.445

[xiv] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, p.198, l.13-17

[xv] Op.cit., p.252, l.17-19

[xvi] Here is the best explanation why Alberti, in Book III of De pictura, recommended two themes for the painter, The Calumny of Apelles, whose theme is dissimulation and deceit, and The Three Graces, the emblem of amicizia’s liberality and reciprocity.

[xvii] It is necessary to say, in passing, that Alberti’s realism as an observer of the world forced him to acknowledge contradictory facts at the same time as he advanced general theories.  Leonardo’s credo derives from a sense of the beauty of creation.  Yet there were, in nature, poisonous and stinging things.  These were Momus’s contribution to Creation: ‘He filled the world with bugs, moths, wasps, hornets, cockroaches and other nasty little creatures similar to himself.’ (Knight and Brown, Momus, p.15): ‘Universum enim terrarum orbem cimice, tinea, fuconibus, carbonibus, scaraveonibus et eiusmodi obscenis et sui similibus bestiolis refertissimum reddidit.’(para 5)

[xviii] Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces, a translation of the Intercenales by David Marsh, Binghampton, New York, 1987, p.155

[xix]Mancini 1890, p. 137;  Marsh, p.24, “Cease. O man, cease searching into the secrets of the gods deeper than mortals are allowed.” Alberti  is dealing with the same theme in Apologhi, LXIV, p. 92: ‘Catella delicata quae, nisi decies prius olefecisset ore nihil capere consueverat, quom alii canes ossa ilico omnia, ut ceciderant, intercepissent, fame acta atrum et siccum panem ipso in aere, dum iactaretur excipere didicit.’  A pernickety puppy will not gnaw on a bone until it has sniffed at it ten times.  The other dogs meanwhile fall unhesitatingly upon any that come their way.  At last, driven by hunger, the puppy learns to jump and catch in mid air what is thrown, including dry and rotten bread.  This could be referring to relic cults and the bread of the mass. Alternatively, the idea seems to be that the sceptic’s careful consideration of data is thwarted by its being put to another meaning prematurely. The sceptical philosopher then turns himself into a speculative philosopher, in order that the stuff that he processes cannot fall into the maw of lesser people.

[xx] Leon Battista Alberti, Apologi, introduzione etc. di Marcello Ciccuto, Rizzoli: Milano, 1989, p.88

[xxi] Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia [get]

[xxii] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.129, l.841-43.  Below, in Book IV, Adovardo considers divorce under Canon Law.  Marriage is a ‘cosa divina’ and excludes the possibility of divorce.  However, in the event of childlessness, the divine gives way to nature, and divorce is permitted. [p.388]

[xxiii] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, para 30, p.35: “…alii vim quandam infusam rebus, qua universa moveantur, cuiusve quasi radii quidam sint hominum animi, Deum putandum asserebant.’(p.34)

[xxiv] The note of Virginia Brown directs the reader to Seneca.

[xxv] [get][It is a point that I’ve written about somewhere else, on the matter of the prince, the father and the ship’s captain –see Grafton doc.]  Alberti’s allocation of co-relative authority to these, on analogy with God’s rule, carries a corollary for Alberti’s politics.  Just as Man knows God by His works but is not equipped intellectually to enquire into His reasons, so the citizen, child and ship’s passenger are to defer to the wisdom and authority of their commanders.  This would seem, at first, to sanction authoritarian government. But Alberti makes implicit that there is a limitation upon this authority: rulers must make the goodness of their motives and works manifest, as God does, in the loveliness of Nature.

[xxvi]L.B. Alberti, Opere Volgari, Vol.III, a cura di Cecil Grayson (Bari: Laterza, 1973), Della Pittura: ‘Solo studia il pittore fingere quello si vede’: De pictura: p.10-11

[xxvii] De pictura? De Re?- A thousand men in a thousand years… [get} At the end of De pictura, he writes, ‘…nulla sit ars quae non a mendosis admodum initiis exordiums sumpserit.  Simul enim ortum atque perfectum nihil esse aiunt.’ De Pictura, p.107; Della pittura: Niuna si truovi arte quale non abbia avuto inizi da cose mendoes; nulla si truova insieme nato e perfetto.’ P.106

[xxviii] Celsus, De Medicina, Loeb edition, 1938, Trans. Bill Thayer: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Celsus/home.html

[xxix]Orlandi, L’Architettura, VII, 17, p.661: Perennitate igitur, quoad per mortales fieri possit, immortales habendas censeo.

[xxx]Knight and Brown, Momus, p.43, para 41: ‘Omnium mortalium oculi divinos ipsos ad vultus contuendos intenti haerebant’ (p.42).

[xxxi]Grayson, III, De pictura, p.69: ’Historia vero, quam merito possis et laudare et admirari, eiusmodi erit quae illecebris quibusdam sese ita amenam et ornatam exhibeat, ut oculos docti atquie indocti spectatoris, diutius quadam cum voluptate et animi motu detineat.’  Alberti revisited the theme in his dialogue Pontifex[1437] and, as one of the interlocutors, says, “Ac vide … quid meam inciderit in mentem; jam ut de rege … eritne veluti quod de pictoribus evenit, ut etiam ignari artis illius pictas res tamen intuentes emendatiorem praeferant; sic et rex ipso aspectu de hominis virtute sententiam prope veram ferat?  An secus veluti qui musicum sit approbaturus, idem et modorum sit non inexpertus decet, ita et in homine morum et virtutis concinnitas nisi a sapiente queat discerni? Mancini, 1890, p.113

[xxxii] Knight and Brown, Momus, I, 41, p.42: ‘Undique confluebant … et matres et nurus e senes et omnis aetas…’

[xxxiii] Orlandi, L’Architettura, VII, 3, p.545: ‘His de rebus velim templo tantum adesse pulchritudinis, ut nulla speties ne cogitari uspiam possit ornatior; et omni ex parte it esse paratum opto, ut qui ingrediantur stupefacti exhorrescant rerum dignarum admiratione, vixque se contineant, quin clamore profiteantur, dignum profecto esse locorum deo, quod intueantur.’

[xxxiv] Knight and Brown, Momus, IV, 9, p.278-80: ‘…Iuppiter pario ex marmore ingentes innumerasque columnas, maximorum montium frustra, gigantum opus, admiratur et tantas numero et vastas et in eam regionem locorum aut tractas esse aut erectas…’

[xxxv] Rykwert et al, p.241: Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.659: ‘…de diis quisnam adeo erit ineptus, ut non intelligat mente non oculis diffiniendum esse?’

[xxxvi] Solomon himself desisted from so immodest a claim: “ But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!” 2^nd Chronicles 6:18 (King James)

[xxxvii] Grayson, Vol. III, De pictura / Della pittura, §25, p.44/45

[xxxviii]Grayson, Vol. II, Theogenius, p. 55, l.2-5: ’Licurgus, dicono, statuì in Sparta facessero alli dii sacrifici non suntuosi nè tali che non potessero ogni dì continuarli. E a’ prudenti principi si vuol dare non cose pregiate dalle persone idiote e vulgari…’

[xxxix] See above note 18 (15.06.08)

[xl] See above, Mapping Devices, note 2 (15.06.08)

[xli] Alberti refused, in De pictura (omitting the argument from Della pittura), to discuss the geometry done by the eye: ‘Neque hob loco disputandum est utrum in ipsa iunctura interioris nervi visus, ut aiunt, quiesctat, an in superficie oculi quasi in speculo animato imagines figurentur.’ Grayson, III, p.19, l.12-14.

[xlii] Orlandi, L’Architettura, IX, 10, p.860/861; Rykwert et al, p.317

[xliii] Paolo Portoghesi, Rome of the Renaissance, translated by Pearl Saunders, London, Phaidon, 1972, pp. 11-12 (for the English translation). Eugène Muntz, Les Arts à la Cour des Papes pendant le XVe et le XVIe siècle, Hildesheim/Zürich/New York, Georg Olms, 1983, pp. 337-338 (transcription from Ludovico Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Milan, 1734, III, 2, col. 949): ‘Romanae namque Ecclesiae auctoritatem maximam ac summam esse, ii soli intelligunt, qui originem et incrementa sua ex literarum cognitione perceperunt.  Ceterorum vero cunctorum populorum turbae literarum ignarae, penitusque expertes, quamvis a doctis et eruditis viris, qualia, et quanta illa sunt, crebro audire, eisque tamquam veris et certis assentiri videantur, nisi tamen egregiis quibusdam visis moveantur, profecto omnis illa eorum assensio debilibus et imbecillis fundamentis innixa, diuturnitate temporis ita paulatim elabitur, ut plerumque ad nihilum recidat.  At vero quum illa vulgaris opinio doctorum hominum relationibus fundata, magnis aedificiis perpetuis quodammodo monumentis, ac testimonis paene sempiternis, quasi a Deo fabricatis, in dies usque adeo corroboratur et confirmatur, ut in vivos posterosque illarum admirabilium constructionum conspectores continue traducatur; ac per hunc modum conservatur et augetur, atque sic conservata et aucta, admirabili quadam devotione conditur et capitur.’  Cf. also, Torgil Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture, in “Figura”, no. 9, Stockholm, Almquist & Wiskell, 1958, pp. 351-362.   See Caroll Westfall  (In this Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447-55, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974) for discussion of Nicholas’ thinking about art and architecture and the role of Alberti in framing his plans. Manfredo Tafuri (Ricerca del Rinascimento: principi, cittá, architetti, Torino, Einaudi, 1992, Chap. 2, “Cives esse non licere.  Nicolò V e Leon Battista Alberti”, pp.33-88), bringing together a large quantity of more recent scholarship, draws attention to differences between the purposes and thinking of Nicholas and Alberti.

[xliv] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.190, lines 69-71 & 74-76.

[xlv]Alberti is emphatic about painting’s ability to address both the learned and unlearned.  Grayson III, De Pictura, Book II, para 28, pp.50-53.  Empathy is a psychologically imitative activity.  It does not require learnedness: ‘…piagniamo con chi piange, e ridiamo con chi ride/…lugentibus conlugeamus, ridentibus adrideamus’(para 41, pp.70/71).

[xlvi] See above, note 18 (15.06.08)

[xlvii] Marsh, 1987, p.16; Mancini, 1890, p.125: “…istoc ne tu in agro etrusco tentas, qui quidem tam undique opertus caligine omnis ignorantiae, cujius et omnis homor est penitus absumptus aestu ambitionum et cupiditatum…’

[xlviii] Marsh, 1987, p.58

[xlix] Knight and Brown, Momus, p.15; ‘Solus Momus, innata contumacia insolescens, nihil ab se fore editum gloriabatur.’ ‘Universum enim terrarum orbem cimice, tinea, fuconibus, crabonibus, scaraveonibus et euismodi obscenis et sui similibus bestiolis refertissimum reddidit.’ (p14)

[l] Marsh,1987, p.28; Mancini, 1980, p.143,’…quantis et quam variis vita hominum morbis refertissima est, ut plane cuivis facile posse videri arbitrer, does ipsos nullam alliam ob caussam hoc omne mortalium genus fecisse, nisi ut essent quos irati infinitis modis saeviendo excruciarent.’

[li] Knight and Brown, Momus, p.167, Book II, para.90: ‘…qui quidem aut nulli sunt aut, si sunt, intesti semper ad miseros mortales malis conficiendos vigilant.’(p.166)

[lii] op.cit., This is the argument developed between §87 and §90 (p.165-167)

[liii] Marsh, 1987, p.110; Mancini, 1890, p.198, ’…verum et homines ipsi hominibus multo perniciosissimi sunt.’

[liv] Marsh, 1987, p.119; Mancini, 1890, p.212, ‘Itaque cum homines hominum caussa procreati et producti sint…’

[lv]Knight and Brown, Momus, p.185, para.109: ‘Pestis est homo homini‘(p.184).

[lvi] Marsh, 1987, p.21; Mancini, 1890, p.133

[lvii] Rykwert et al, p,156: Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.449: ‘Quotus –inquit ille apud Ciceronem- Athenis extat ephebus pulcher!  Deesse aliquid spectator ille formarum, aut plus esse in his, quos non probaret, intelligebat, quod ipsum cum pulchritudinis rationibus non conveniret.  Illis, ni fallor, adhibita ornamenta hoc contulissent, fucando operiendoque siqua extabant deformia, aut comendo expoliendoque venustiora, ut ingrata minus offenderent et amoena magis delectarent.’

[lviii] Marsh, 1987, p.29

[lix] Marsh, 1987, p.73 [get Garin]

[lx] De iciarchia, Book I, p.203, l.21-22

[lxi] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, Book IV, p.349, l.727-29: ‘E sono questi preti fatti come la lucerna, quale posta in terra fa lume, e in alto elevata, quanti piú sale, tanto di sé pié rende inutile ombra.’

[lxii] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, IV, p.345, l.635-639; and ff.: ‘Erano in lui alcuni vizii, e in prima quello uno quasi in tutti e’ preti commune e notissimo: era cupidissimo del denaio tanto, che ogni cosa apresso di lui era da vendere; molti discorreano infami simoniaci, barattieri e artefici d’ogni falsità e fraude.’

[lxiii] Rykwert et al, VII, 13, p.229; Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.627-629:  ‘Apud maiores nostros per illa nostrae religionis initia optimi viri in communionem coenae conveniebant, […] ut convictu mutuo mansuescerent et animo bonis monitis referti domum redirent multo cupidissimi virtutis.  Illic igitur, libatis potius quam assumptis quae in coenam essent per summam frugalitatem apposita, habebatur et lectio et sermo de rebus divinis.  Flagrabant omnium studia ad communem omnium salutem et ad cultum virtutis. […] Omnia istoc pacto inter eos veluti inter amantissimos fratres erant communia.  Post id tempus, cum per principes licuit publice facere, non multo quidem a vetere patrum instituto deviarunt [… ]Itaque unica tum quidem erat ara, ad quam conveniebant, unicum in dies sacrificium celebraturi.  Successere haec tempora, quae utinam vir quispiam gravis, pace pontificum, reprehendenda duceret: qui cum ipsi dignitatis tuendae gratia vix kalendis annuis potestatem populo faciant visendi sui, omnia usque adeo circumferta eddidere altaribus et interdum… non dico plus.  Hoc affermo: apud mortales nihil inveniri, ne excogitari quidem posse, quod sit dignius, sanctius sacrificio.  Ego vero neminem dari bene consultum puto, qui quidem velit res dignissimas nimium perprompta facilitate vilescere.’

[lxiv] Ibid.

[lxv] Giannozzo Alberti, in Book III of De familia, enacts the principle that the bishops, in De re aedificatoria neglect.  As a farmer, he would have his propertu near to the town.  Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, pp.242-3, l.1469-74: ‘…io piu spesso v’anderei, spesso vi manderei, e ogni mattina anderebbe pelle frutte, per l’erbe e pe’ fichi; e andere’mivi io stessi spassando per l’esercizio, e quelli lavoratori, vedendomi spesso, raro peccarebbono, e a me per questo porterebbono piu amore e piu riverenzo, e cosi sarebbono piu diligenti a’lavorii.’  With due alterations of detail, it could be the conduct of a clergyman.

[lxvi] Rykwert et al, p.193; Orlandi, L’Architettura, pp.541-43, ‘Habuere etiam florente urbe opertum paleis et culmo; sic enim pristinam illam partum parsimoniam ducebant.  Sed cum regum caeterorumque civium opulkentua suassisset, ut se urbemque suam  aedificiorum amplitudine honestarent…’

[lxvii] Orlandi, L’Archiettura, VII, 16, p.649, Rykwert et al, p.239, ‘This form of display was eventually adopted not only by those who had served their country in some way, but also by the wealthy and the fortunate, as far as their means would allow.’

[lxviii] Mancini, 1890, pp.67-121

[lxix] Marsh, 1987,p.116ff.  Neophronus’ interlocutor, Polytropus, at the beginning of the account of the former’s funeral service expresses surprise, ‘…that  this elderly man acted contrary to his customs.  In general,’ Polytropus observes, ‘he avoids public gatherings and disdains popular opinion.’

[lxx] Marsh, 1987, pp.176-184

[lxxi] Marsh,1987,  p.62

[lxxii] Knight and Brown, Momus, [get]

[lxxiii] Marsh, 1987, pp.175-76

[lxxiv] Apologhi, p.76-79

[lxxv] Marsh, 1987, p.19

[lxxvi] Marsh, 1987, p.50-51; Mancini, 1890, p.172-174: ‘…in hanc usque diem…’(174)

[lxxvii] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, pp.347-8, l.692-700: ‘Nè mi maraviglio se, come tu [Lionardo] dicevi, e’preti ancora sono cupidissimi, quali insieme l’uno coll’altro gareggiano, non chi più abbia quale e’ debbia virtù e lettera, – pochi sono preti litterati e meno onesti, – ma vogliono tutti soprastare agli altri di pompa e ostentazione; vogliono molto numero di grassissime e ornatissime cavalcature; vogliono uscire in publico con molto esercito di magiatori; e insieme hanno di dì in dì voglie per troppo ozio e per poca virtù lascivissime, temerarie, inconsulte.’ [trans. author]

[lxxviii] Grayson, II, Sentenze pitagoriche, p.299

[lxxix] Marsh, 1987,p.75 [see Garin]

[lxxx]Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.5, l.64-68; 79-81

[lxxxi]Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.8. l.159-170

[lxxxii]Grayson, I, p. 348

[lxxxiii]Rykwert et al, VI,3, p.158; ‘Cum haec ita essent, placuit regum potentissimorum amplitudinem cum vetere frugalitate coniungere…’. Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.455. Alberti’s tone deprecates the opulent part, for, earlier in the passage recounting the history of architecture, he reprehended the grandiose schemes of eastern tyrants.

[lxxxiv] See note 36 (14.06.08)

[lxxxv] [get] Platina and Pius on Nicholas V’s liturgical fastidiousness

[lxxxvi] See above [get]

[lxxxvii] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, 48, p.48

[lxxxviii] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, 49, p.50.  Momus resembles the rebellious Stefano Porcari at this point.

[lxxxix] Marsh, p.59

[xc] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book III, 26, pp.223-25

[xci] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, Book III, p.271, l.33-36: Quello onde consentirono e’ populi a stare sotto la iuridizione di chi gli regga, fu per vivere insieme senza iniurie e fruttare le cose sue con libertà quieta.  A questo potrà niuno conferire più che l’omo savio e virtuoso.’

[xcii] De re aedificatoria, V, 6, p.359

[xciii] Op.cit., V, 7, p.361

[xciv] Op.cit., V, 7, p.363: ‘Adde quod bonorum est, quales et esse et haberi pontifices volunt, ea meditari studere prosequi, quae hominum generi ab homine deberi intelligant, aegrotos  umbelles destitutos et eiusmodi officio beneficio misericordia levando iuvando.’

[xcv] Op.cit., V, 3, p.349: ‘Ac mihi quidem uti eius militis fortitudo non probatur, qui de se nihilo plus praestet, quam at insultantem hostem obdurate perferat, sic et ab arce expectandum poto, ut non modo substinere lacessentem, verum et compescere impetentes valeat.’

88 De Iciarchia , Book II, p.241, l.5-10

[xcvii] Orlandi, L’Architettura, V, 8, p.367

[xcviii] [get] Landino, Disputationes Camaldulenses

[xcix] See Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, Constable: London, 1970, Vol.2, p.674-75

[c] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan , p.251

[ci] Renée Watkins, p.191-92: “What kind of person could fail to take pleasure in his farm [villa]?  The farm is of great, honorable, and reliable value.  Any other occupation is fraught with a thousand risks, carries with it a mass of suspicions and of trouble, and brings numerous losses and regrets.  […]  The farm alone seems reliable, generous trustworthy and truthful.  Managed with diligence and love, it never wearies of repaying you.  Reward follows reward.  In spring the farm gives you a multitude of delights; greenery, flowers, aromas, songs.  It tries to please you, it smiles and promises you a magnificent harvest, it fills you with good hopes as well as sufficient joy in the present.  Then in summer how courteously it attends on you!  First one sort of fruit, then another, comes to your house – your house is never empty of some gift.  Then there is autumn: now the farm gives liberal reward for your labors, shows great gratitude for your merit – gladly, copiously, and faithfully serves you!  Twelvefold reward is yours – for a little sweat, many casks of wine.”; Romano, Tenenti, Furlan , p.244, l.1506-1527: ‘Quale uomo fusse, il quale non si traesse piacere della villa? Porge la villa utile grandissimo, onestissimo e certissimo. E pruovasi qualunque altro essercizio intopparsi in mille pericoli, hanno seco mille sospetti, seguongli molti danni e molti pentimenti: in comperare cura, in condurre paura, in serbare pericolo, in vendere sollicitudine, in credere sospetto, in ritrarre fatica, nel commutare inganno. E così sempre degli altri essercizii ti premono infiniti affanni e agonie di mente. La villa sola sopra tutti si truova conoscente, graziosa, fidata, veridica. Se tu la governi con diligenza e con amore, mai a lei parerà averti satisfatto; sempre agiugne premio a’ premii. Alla primavera la villa ti dona infiniti sollazzi, verzure, fiori, odori, canti; sforzasi in più modi farti lieto, tutta ti ride e ti promette grandissima ricolta, émpieti di buona speranza e di piaceri assai. Poi e quanto la truovi tu teco alla state cortese! Ella ti manda a casa ora uno, ora un altro frutto, mai ti lascia la casa vòta di qualche sua liberalità. Eccoti poi presso l’autunno. Qui rende la villa alle tue fatiche e a’ tuoi meriti smisurato premio e copiosissime mercé, e quanto volentieri e quanto abundante, e con quanta fede! Per uno dodici, per uno piccole sudore più e più botti di vino.’;  Grayson II, De iciarchia, p.199, l.8-10:…’delizie della villa, opere senza invidia, piene di maraviglioso diletto, utili alla sanita, utili a fuggire questa dapocaggine e torpetudine in quale niuno buon pensiere vi puo capere.’

[cii] Grayson, II, Naufragio, p.350, l.17-21; Marsh, 1987, p.160

[ciii] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, 61, p.59/61: ‘…et quod divinos Aurorae vultus his artibus, quoad libeat, liceat imitari, et quod nostris in curis et laboribus patefactam ad superos deos immortales consulendos placandosque via habeamus.  Hac pacem opemque poscere superum, hac, diis volentibus et annuentibus, quasi quodam rerum agendarum  commercio iungi superis facili levique negotio possumus. Ite ea de re posthac puellae, atque  a diis audete votis quaeque collibuerint petere.’(p.58-60)  This is an instructive case of the tortuous complexity of Alberti’s narrative voice.  This speech is given by Momus, disguised as a girl, recalling a dream in which her nurse had appeared and spoken to her and whose speech she now paraphrases.

[civ] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, 65, p.62

[cv] Ibid., 66.

[cvi] Marsh, 1987,  p.19; Leon Battista Alberti, Le Intercenali, traduzione e introduzione di Ida Garghella, Napoli; Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1998, p.25.

[cvii] Mancini, 1890, p.129

[cviii] Mancini, 1890, ibid.; Marsh, 1987, ibid.

 [cix]Marsh, 1987, p.20: Mancini, 1890, p.131: ‘Quae quidem res dum ita sit, insani vos quidem longe deliratis, si existimatis deos ab incerto et pristino cursu rerum, vestris verbis aut persuasionibus, ad novas alias res agendas animum aut operam divertere.’

[cx] Mancini, 1890, p.130

[cxi] Knight and Brown, Momus, II, 2.  ‘The practice [of prayer] spread, thanks to the even-handed kindness of the gods, until fathers and adults began to say prayers, too.  Initially their prayers were righteous and of the sort that could be made openly in public, with the approval of friends and enemies alike, and so the gods heard their prayers freely and with good will.  Then it transpired that even kings and wealthy republics grew used to making demands on the gods in prayer. ‘Ac manavit quidem res pari deorum facilitate usque dum patres maioresque natuu faceree et ipsi vota accessere, sed primo iusta atque ea quidem eiusmodi ut facere palam medio in foro amicis (ut aiunt) inimicisque probantibus deceret: ergo ab diis sponte ac volentibus audiebantur.  Accessit item ut reges ditissimaeque resublicae votis deos poscere assuescerent.’ (pp.92-95)

[cxii] Knight and Brown, Momus, p.167, 90: Et quid iuvat tantis supplicationibus obsecrationibusque pacem deum alias res agentium, aut mala reddentium, exposcere?’[p.166]

[cxiii]Knight and Brown, Momus, p.177, 100.

[cxiv] Orlandi, L’Architettura, VIII,1.  Interestingly, Giannozzo Manetti, in his Life of Nicholas V, describes plans for the extensions to the liturgical east end of the church of St Peter’s.  Burial within the church would, in future, be prohibited and a mausoleum would be built.  See Magnuson, [get date] pp.358-59, line 119

[cxv]Knight and Brown, Momus, p.155, para 75

[cxvi] Mancini, 1890, p.75: ‘… verbis utuntur ex industria castissimis cum vita sint incestissimi, vultum et frontem praebent tristem et gravem cum animo et pectore sint levissimi et lascivissimi.’

[cxvii]Knight and Brown, Momus, p.263, para 65: ‘Quibus calamitatibus acti, hominum genus, quod deos votis aureis maiorem in modum moveri animadvertissent. […] Quicquid erat rerum dignarum ubivis gentium, id ad templi, ad sacrificiorum ad ludorumque ornatum convexerant.’ (p.262)

[cxviii]Knight and Brown, Momus, p.265, para 68: ‘Et monebat ut diligentius pensitaret votane haec facta religione haud minore quam impensa…’(p.264)

[cxix]Knight and Brown, Momus, p.299, para 31: ‘Atqui’ inquit Charon ‘suspendio opus fuit priusquam istud admitteres in te, ut tuae res omnes solis in precibus niterentur.’(p.298)

[cxx]Knight and Brown, Momus,Book IV, 34, p.301

[cxxi] Knight and Brown, Momus, 12 ff., Book IV, p.283ff.

[cxxii] Marsh, 1987, p.162: ‘Non profecto a tanta tempestate ad tantam crudelitatem servati summus a diis, sed quantum ex superum pietate interpretari licet, ad salutem et ad deorum beneficium testificandum servamur.’ Grayson, Vol.II, p.354, ll.31-34.

[cxxiii] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book IV, 23, p.291

[cxxiv] De re aedificatoria, VII, 17

[cxxv] Rykwert et al, VII, 13, p. 229; Orlandi, L’Architettura, p. 627-629’…Successere haec tempora, quae utinam vir quispiam gravis, pace pontificum, reprehendenda duceret: qui cum ipsi dignitatis tuendae gratia vix kalendis annuis potestatem populo faciant visendi sui, omnia usque adeo circumferta eddidere altaribus et interdum… non dico plus. Hoc affermo: apud mortales nihil inveniri, ne excogitari quidem posse, quod sit dignius, sanctius sacrificio. Ego vero neminem dari bene consultum puto, qui quidem velit res dignissimas nimium perprompta facilitate vilescere.»

[cxxvi] Stefano Borsi, Alberti e Roma, Edizioni Polistampa, Firenze, 2003,p.16

[cxxvii] Fortune persuades mortal Hercules that there is an easier way to the realm of the gods than by means of the flame that Virtue has placed on her altar.  He should hide himself in the shade among soft grasses (‘teque inter molles istras herbas obdito in umbra’) and there make a great and incomprehensible din.  This will be enough to lure Rumor who will carry him to heaven. Momus, para. 82-86

 [cxxviii]Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, 88, p.82-85

[cxxix] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, 88, p.84

[cxxx] It is necessary to confess that Alberti also says the precise opposite of this.  He concludes Sentenze pitagoriche (Grayson, II, p.300): “Ultimo, stima certo dell’animo tuo ch’ello e cosa divina e immortale.’  However, it might be possible to read the Sentences, which Alberti instructed should be consigned to memory, as pragmatic statements, designed for young people.  The reader was also instructed to honour his elders (‘onora e’ maggiori’, p.299).

[cxxxi] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, 82, p.78

[cxxxii] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book II, 75, p.155, para 75: ‘Horum duas primum de diis exstitisse sententias… Alii deos esse cum ipsi non credant[…], credi tamen vulgo velint sua praesertim causa, id quidem ut venerentur, ut arma, castra, imperiaque sua deorum metu muniant atque ad stabilitatem firmitatemque corroborent. Cui sententiae illud addunt, ut se quidem esse deorum interpretes, cum nymphis, cum locorum numinibus magnisque cum diis grandia habere rerum agendarum commercia excogitatis vanitatum figmentis assimulent.’(p.154)

[cxxxiii] Knight and Brown, Momus, p.167, para.90: ‘…qui quidem aut nulli sunt aut, si sunt, intesti semper ad miseros mortales malis conficiendos vigilant.’(p.166) [Get see above]

[cxxxiv] Knight and Brown, Momus, p. 167/8, para 91: ‘…illico in illam omnem scelestissimam familiam litteratorum omnem…’(p.166/8)

[cxxxv] Knight and Brown, Momus, p. 173, para 96: ‘…ut cerimoniarum religio observaretur, ut pietas, sanctimonia virtusque coleretur.’(p.172)

[cxxxvi] Knight and Brown, Momus, p.176/7, para 99: ‘…contulerit quae quidem ad hominem usum, ad vitae necessitatem, ad bene beateque vivendum conferrent, quaead otium et tranquillitatem facerent, quaead salutem, ad ornamentum, ad decus publicarum privatarumque rerum conducerent, quae ad cognitionem superum, ad metum deorum, ad observationem religionis accommodarent!’

[cxxxvii] Knight and Brown, Momus, p.185, para.109: ‘Pestis est homo homini‘(p.184)[Get see above]

[cxxxviii]Knight and Brown, Momus, p.313, para 49: ‘Solus si essem fortassis riderem, plures si adessent alii venerarer.’(p.312)

[cxxxix] Cicero, De natura deorum, [get]

[cxl] Knight and Brown, Momus p.353, para 101: ‘Dignari se votis patietur et humiliorum indecentias ita feret moderate uti minoribus suos pati fastus volet.’(p.352)

[cxli] See James Lawson, Albertiana[get]

[cxlii] See above note 52 (15.06.08)

[cxliii] De iciarchia, Bk.II, p.221, l.28-32

[cxliv] During controversies about whether the east end of SS Annunziata should be in the form of a rotunda, Alberti was cited as a supporter.  See Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti… [get]

[cxlv] Alberti was awarded the priorate of S. Martino by Eugenius IV in 1432.  See, Franco Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti, L’Opera Completa, p.288.  The church is a simple hall with a pitched roof, an east end raised three steps above the body and, containing the altar, a semi-circular apse, raised a further two steps articulated with two square columns and four pilasters and entablature.  The apse is attributed to Alberti.

[cxlvi] See above, note 8 (15.06.08)

[cxlvii] Mancini, 1980, pp.236-37; see also Grayson, II, p.45.  The differences are very minor.  Grayson concludes ‘poi cosi starete beati.’

[cxlviii] Mancini, 1911, describes the proceedings, pp.200-216).

[cxlix]Petrarch, Opere Latine di Francesco Petrarca, a cura di Antonietta Bufano, Torino: Unione Tipografico-editrice Torinese, 1975 (reprinted 1987), p.1258

[cl] The appearance of the Thunderer in the clouds and his descent resembles that described by Abraham of Suzdal, a Russian bishop who witnessed the Sacra Rappresentazione that was staged at SS. Annunziata on 25^th March, 1439, the Feast of the Annunciation.  Alberti, too, seems to have witnessed the spectacle and to have heard the sound effects, for thunderous noise was a part of it.  The stage machinery was designed by Brunelleschi.  See, Eugenio Battisti, Brunelleschi: the complete work, London: Thames & Hudson, 1981, p.300.

[cli]Orlandi, L’Architettura, VII, 4, p.549: ‘At nostri quidem ad usum sacrificii passim basilicas usurparunt. Id quidem, tum quod a principio basilicis privatorum convocari et congruere consuessent, tum quod in eis summa cum dignitate pro tribunali ara collocaretur et circum aras chorus bellissime haberetur; relquum basilicae, uti est ambulatio et porticus, populo aut spatianti aut ad sacrificium adstanti pateret. Accedebat quod concionantis pontificis vox commodius basilica auderetur materiam quam testitudinato in templo’. [get a better quote]

[clii] Opere Latini di Francesco Petrarca, p.1258

[cliii] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book I, 56, p.54: ’…dea sese nisi in templo alibi pernoctare instituisse negat…’

[cliv] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.289, l.3134-36

[clv]Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.377-78, l.1483-96: ‘Ma come non si dirà tempio né basilica perfetta quella struttura a quale tetto, che cuopra chi entro al sacrificio fusse dal sole e dalle piove, e sponde mancasse, quali parte difendano da’ venti, parte la tengano segretata dagli altri siti publici e profani, e forse ancora manchandoli e’ dovuti a sé ornamenti sarebbe edificio non perfetta né assoluto, così la amicizia mai si dirà perfetta e compiuta, a quale manchi delle sue parte alcuna. Né sarà vera amicizia se fra gli amici non sarà una comune fede e ferma e semplice affezione d’animo si fatta, ch’ella escluda e fuori tenga ogni suspizione e odio, quale da parte alcuna potesse disturbare la dolce fra loro pace e unione. Né io reputerò perfetta amicizia quella quale non sia piena d’ornamenti di virtu e costume; a qual certo cose chi dubita la sola per sé benivolenza non valervi, se non quando sia e conosciuta e ricambiata?’

[clvi]In the event, the Benedictine monastery was suppressed by Pope Sixtus IV in 1472, and Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, as the pope’s direct agent, was put in charge of the church.  See, Eugene Johnson, S. Andrea in Mantua, Pennsylvannia State University Press: University Park and London, 1975, p. 46, note 33 (p.111)

[clvii] See below, Region and Morality – the Ur-form

[clviii] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.206-07, l.418–19: ‘…commandògli (the body) la natura mai patisse ubidire ad altri che all’anima propria.’  Another  case of his making a fine display of an ostensibly contentious point is where Giannozzo proclaims, ‘Santa cosa la masserizia!’ Op.cit., p.201, l.234-35. Lionardo responds to the shock that Giannozzo’s expression contains  when, later, he says, ‘Seguite, Giannozzo, dirci di questa santa masserizia…’(p.203, l.311-12)  He says something very similar in Profugiorum ab aerumna.   Angolo Pandolfini is the speaker, paraphrasing Pythagoras (Grayson, II, p.123, l.9-10): ‘…né volle la natura noi omicciuoli esser d’altro che di noi stessi custodi…’

[clix]Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, Translated by Barbara Foxley, Introduction by André Boutet de Monvel, London: J.N. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1957(1762), p.243

[clx]Émile, p.252

[clxi] Grayson II, De iciarchia , p.266, lines 16-18, 27-29

[clxii]Marsh, 1987, Defunctus, pp.[get]

[clxiii] Marsh, 1987, Annuli, pp.214[?]

[clxiv] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, pp.255-56, l.1835-7

[clxv] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.166, l.1886-95:  ‘Anzi volse [Nature] che in quello in quale io manco, ivi tu suplisca, e in altra cosa manchi la quale sia apresso di quell’altro.  Perche questo? Perche io abbia di te bisogno, tu di colui, colui di uno altro, e qualche uno di me, e cosi questo aver bisogno l’uno uomo dell’altro sia cagione e vinculo a conservarci insieme con publica amicizia e congiunzione.  E forse questa necessita fu essordio e principio di fermare le republice, di costituirvi le leggi molto piu che come  diceva… fuoco o d’acqua essere cagione di tanta fra gli uomini e si con legge, ragione e costumi colligata unione de’ mortali.’

[clxvi] Grayson, I, Cena familiaris, p.347

[clxvii]Grayson, I, p. 99

[clxviii]Grayson, I, p. 324