Architecture, for Leon Battista Alberti, was a somewhat hermetic business. There would, as the proper conclusion of the process, be a building –a material object. It would be sound, serviceable and handsome. However, the prior act, the designing for the sake of the building, also had its completeness. Building was the secondary process that, customarily, followed the instructions of design.

In parallel with this dual state of things was the relationship between a building and its patron. As a representation of the patron –person or institution– the building was, like the painted portrait, made of base stuff. Bricks and mortar: pigment and gum. What the building and what the painting refer to are, however, less grossly palpable. They presuppose a programme of action, an intellectual artifice.

Some sort of communicative thread was needed to connect the lofty patron and the designer or architect –moving and formal causes– with the thing existing in the world of matter. The painter aimed to create likeness and represent the sitter’s moral values. The architect would represent the patron’s social qualities in more abstract terms. Alberti was an architect and he was the agent of his patrons. In the one guise, he was connected with the world of ideas. In the other, he was a communicator between prince and builder. But even in that latter role, his powers of communication did not stretch as far as the common worker. Luca Fancelli, Matteo de’ Pasti, Bernardo Rossellino and others acted as his clerks of works and carried out Mercury’s lower tasks.

Insofar as Alberti was messenger, as architect or proxy for his patron, between the immaterial realm of architecture and the material one of building, he merits study not just for projects realised but also for ideas had and advice given. As someone who did not always complete the delivery of the message to the lower operatives, his creative character is often ambiguous and elusive. His architecture, in the material sense, is imperfectly realised. The present aim is to describe something of the immaterial architectural activity of Alberti.

He has an architectural oeuvre that continues to test students, who would be pleased to be able to establish the extent of his responsibility. But, in addition, a discussion of his architectural activity does not limit itself to res gestae. He worked also as a theorist and historian. Most famously, he wrote an architectural treatise which –he intended– would rival and emulate Vitruvius’ Ten Books. His theory of architecture as laid out in De re aedificatoria is not the present theme. Scholarship has pondered it extensively. However, those ideas that he developed in other contexts and that fed into his stated architectural theory are of particular interest. Also, Alberti cast a shadow, or else a light of illumination, on real architecture. He influenced the thinking and practice of others. This shadow or brightness –perverse metaphors and things essentially eluding definition– can be thought of as a blurring of the silhouette of Alberti’s activity as an architect.

Alberti’s thinking about architecture was historical and archaeological. Gathered together in De re aedificatoria is an immense quantity of material gleaned from literature. Then, he claimed to have studied ancient buildings first-hand, and there is evidence enough in his own architecture that he did so. His thinking was also rational and scientific; he was attempting, in his treatise, to put together a theory of architecture such that it would make sense to the Aristotelean in us. Architecture was to imitate Nature and it was to be describable in terms of the familiar scientific categories of quantity, quality and place. His thinking was also formalistic; a mathematics that Vitruvians would readily understand was to underlie the matter of it. Alberti’s Platonism was just one aspect of his thought. In addition, insofar as a theory of decorum determined architectural imagery, his thinking was also associational. The prince, the tyrant or the gentleman would disclose his character in his palace.¹ The city would announce its values as it gave prominence now to its various churches, now to the buildings of its public institutions.

This last aspect of Alberti’s thought locates architecture very much among the social arts. And, in doing so, it establishes a certain mental cityscape –a spectacle– within which he pictured social exchanges, rituals and compacts. So, throughout his writings, architecture figures either explicitly or else as an implicit platform. The themes acted out are essentially moral ones; and the architecture which accommodates them emerges as an art of moral composition and disposition.

Thus, as well as Alberti’s architecture considered as the activity of the drawing board and as the stuff of bricks and mortar, there is to be discussed his ‘moral’ architecture. This last architecture has an altogether more elusive existence and the search for it includes discussion of that part of architectural practice that, in Alberti’s case, was definitively remote from the building site. The architect, Alberti, was also a planner and an advisor. He described himself in the role of advisor in De re aedificatoria in the chapter where the relationship of architect and patron is the theme: ‘If you have gained some benefit from my experience, and this has saved you substantial expense or made a real contribution to your comfort and pleasure, do I not, for heaven’s sake, deserve a substantial reward? A wise man will stand on his dignity; save your sound advice or fine drawings for someone who really wants them.’² In those ideas which leave only the faintest trace and in those discussions that vanished into thin air there was consideration of practical, political, aesthetic and moral or social aims in building.

In attempting to discover Alberti’s thinking about architectural decorum, the first thing to do, then, is sketch him as planner and advisor. The exercise is sometimes, perforce, somewhat speculative. Arguments for what he did are to be constructed in part from traces of evidence left behind after his death. Then, the moral character of architecture, for him, will need to be established. Architecture’s ability to function as the mis-en-scène of satisfactory social relations –of friendship and fidelity– are to be demonstrated.

So far, architecture is to be thought of as conceived by Alberti in a spirit of moral optimism. A good society was realisable, and it was expressible architecturally. The good citizen and the good prince were possibilities. Emblematic of Alberti’s ideal platform for architecture and harmonious human relations was the Certame Coronario, the poetry contest that he organised to take place in Florence Cathedral, and where the theme was amicizia –friendship. A building and an occasion were to comprise an exemplary moral theatre.

The religious and political realities of the times, however, gave rise to anxiety. There is reason to believe that Alberti found that the architectural-moral project was flawed. In particular, the Church was not necessarily the locus of morality. Alberti’s religious scepticism will be discussed. Then, the church was not exclusively the place (nor perhaps the institution) where moral conduct was defined and enacted. Perhaps the true religion had no necessary use for the architect’s most ambitious undertaking. What might be called ‘moral space’ could be designed outside of the church. This space, beyond the ambit of institutional Christianity in its evolved fifteenth-century form, is worthy of identification and discussion. In short, there are hints to be found in Alberti’s life and work pointing to his actual disapproval of church building, the art that, so prominently in hindsight, he practised. He lived out a contradiction. But, as will be seen, it was one that Judeo-Christian religion itself contained. It is possible to read Alberti’s religious architecture as an attempt to address the problem. There even seem to be signs that, not Plato, but Epicurus and Lucretius haunted the core of his thinking.

Insofar as Alberti’s view of architecture was moral, it was reductive in its elements. His terms of architectural composition were candour, congregation and witness. These generated an architectural form that could then be elaborated and composed.

1. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, V1 ↩︎
2. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge, Mass./London, M.I.T. Press, 1988, p.318; L’Architettura [De re aedificatoria], a cura di Giovanni Orlandi, introduzione e note di Paolo Portoghesi, Milano, Polifilo, 1966, IX, 11, p.863: ‘Te enim ut meis monitis peritiorem efficiam in ea re, in qua aut maximo te levem dispendio aut commodis et voluptati vehementer conferam, me superi!, praemium merebitur non mediocre.  Dignitatem idcirco servasse consulti est; fidum consilium poscenti castigataque lineamenta praestitisse sat est.’ ↩︎