Cease. O man, cease searching into the secrets of the gods deeper than mortals are allowed.[1]  

For Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), there were things that were unknowable and about which it was useless to speculate.  He advocated philosophical scepticism.  If knowledge of the divine is not to be had, what remains to be embraced in this world in its frames of space and time?  Alberti was emphatically a student of nature and history.  So, I take his advice and apply it generally. There are parts of any biographical subject that are axiomatically also beyond the reach of enquiry.  I avoid presuming to know more than what Alberti said and did.  Specifically, the psychological springs of his action remain unknown within the text that follows.  That is not to say that there is no speculation.  On the contrary; for I look precisely towards the uncertain in his life and work. But the object of speculation is his conscious action, not that impelled by mood, temperament or predisposition. 

This book intends to be complementary to the scholarly literature on Alberti as architect and theorist.  It attempts neither the narrative breadth nor the psychological penetration of a biography: nor is it a close study of his architecture.  There already exists an extensive literature covering these themes, including recently-published monographs in English by Richard Tavernor and Anthony Grafton.  Massimo Bulgarelli has lately (2008) contributed to the extensive Italian resources.  Whether it is to the credit of the subject or the scholarship that he has sparked is difficult to determine: but it is a remarkable thing to be able to say that great monographs like those of Franco Borsi (1986) and –remarkably- Girolamo Mancini (1911) remain invaluable.[2]  Here, the approach is through Alberti’s own writings.

Instead of looking at Alberti the biographical subject, at the architectural works that he designed or at the theory of architecture that he framed, the present work is concerned with, so-to-speak, the spaces or gaps in between.  The facts of his life, the matter of his buildings and the internal connections of his architectural thought constitute the three relatively stable points in what, from our perspective, is a fluid medium of more elusive actions and meditations.  Alberti’s non-architectural writings have a tenor that preconditioned and chimed with his thinking and practice of architecture.  Only ostensibly peripheral to the question of his architecture, they reward closer reading.  His practice of architecture itself did not always realise itself in bricks and mortar.  The incomplete, the modified and the aborted call to be considered.  He also adopted a role that was polemical and advisory. The architecture of others is to be looked at, where it has been shaped by Alberti’s instruction and suggestion.

Alberti is the object of a scholarly interest that still grows, to the extent that it now supports a dedicated journal, Albertiana.  Among many, Stefano Borsi, in recent years, has made a considerable contribution to the scholarship concerned with Leon Battista Alberti.  On the basis of his enormously extensive knowledge of primary documentary sources, going to considerable depths of interpretation and, boldly, to limits of reasoned speculation, he weaves a narrative tapestry of a closeness of texture that invites the shortest perspective.

The general reader, however, needs to view the matter from some distance and be permitted to trace more general outlines.  The aim here is to identify and consider Alberti’s more important ideas.  Reading across the extent of his writings in so many genres, treating so much diverse material, we find him addressing certain points again and again.  His own thought, in other words, was not a set of distinct aperçus and arguments emerging uniquely from the matter to hand: rather, it was a continual attempt to express and connect ideas, both central and recurrent.  He sought to establish a foundation – a set of values that we would need to cleave to if we were to play our part in a benign and productive social world.  The project acknowledged the prevalent obstacles to its realization.  Although Alberti was interested in all sorts of subjects, from history to cartography, from cryptography to equestrianism, his concerns were centrally and over-archingly with moral matters.  So, why we live in society, how what we think relates to what we feel and how we should conduct ourselves are some of his crucial questions.  He looked for answers and he stated his conclusions on them in that multitude of contexts.  As a consequence, whilst the object here is the interpretation of historical material, it is not the tracing of a historical process.  The story of his life and the building histories do that.  What follows is without the convenient framework of chronological sequence.  Some objects and texts will recur in discussions, as these several contexts are considered and as various perspectives are adopted.

Together with the scholarly attention that Alberti receives goes historiographical reflexiveness.  However, for the sake of simplicity, its complications and contentions are not addressed here.

Some justification needs to be offered for the form and anatomy of this book.  The one perhaps withholds the comfort of the familiar, and the other maybe belongs to a somewhat loosely-connected and ill-coordinated creature.  It can seem presumptuous for a writer to require the reader to trace a wayward path to an indefinite conclusion.  However, the very connectedness of Alberti’s thought makes tendentious the clarity of successiveness.  The chapters link also independently of the argument implicit in their sequence.  Some focus upon practical, some upon theoretical matters.  Others consider his thinking about faith, morality and society.  His philosophy aimed at identifying the unifying principle in Nature, Art and Society.

It is the nature of an exercise like this that investigations could always go further, that avenues open in profusion.   So, here, there are themes that go disregarded, neglected and overlooked.  Hares are started that others will be more fleet to pursue.  That is the hope.

Of the visual arts, painting and sculpture, the subjects of two of Alberti’s treatises, could treat matters of moral concern very readily.  Architecture would, as first, seem to be excluded from such a task, incapable of representation in the same direct sense as painting and sculpture.  It would be glib to state that sculpture of the single figure exposes character, that the painted historia reveals the factors acting upon the caste of characters and that architecture provides the necessary spectacle to frame the drama.  But Alberti did find, in architecture, the stage upon which these questions and answers could be enunciated and proposed.  Set down within the architectural environment, the morally alert individual willingly obeys its injunctions.

This book considers Alberti in his own words.

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[1] Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces, a translation of the Intercenales by David Marsh, Binghampton, New York, 1987, p.24.  This instruction appears in ‘Fatum and Fortuna’, one of his Intercenali; short tales and fables to be recited and presumably discussed between dinner-courses. Leonis Baptistae Alberti, Opera Inedita et Pauca Separatim Impressa, curante Hieronymo Mancini, Florentiae, J.C. Sansoni, 1890, p. 137: ‘…desine, inquiunt, homo, istiusmodi dei deorum occulta investigare longius quam mortalibus liceat…’[Get check]

[2] Richard Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1998; Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance, Penguin, 2002; Massimo Bulgarelli, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72): Architettura e  Storia, Electa: Milano, 2008;  Franco Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti: L’Opera Completa, Electa: Milano, 1980; Girolamo Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, Bardi Editore: Roma, 1971 (Reprint of 1911Edition)