Alberti’s thought sometimes reveals itself in his utterances, but sometimes hides itself behind them.  His writings are peppered with expressions of Christian piety.  However, as has been seen, they also conceal, to differing degrees, two themes indicative of a troubled faith.  One is anti-clericalism, sometimes emerging as a flash of anger or disdain.  The other is religious doubt, sometimes descending, it seems, to atheistic levels.  In his moments of criticism of the clergy, Alberti, like any others of similar view, was in effect questioning its project.  A history of Christianity had arrived at a doctrine and a political structure, and possessed an instrument for maintaining their stability – a hierarchy bound in obedience.  The critic accepted the challenge to address this history and ask whether its every shift was necessary and right.  Alberti believed that the values of the early Christians were no longer present in modern Christianity, that in fact a history of moral decline was revealed in contemporary practices.  Wrong paths had been taken.  It is difficult not to think that that history of church-building that accompanied the history of the religion should similarly have caused him dismay.  So much was the building an instrument of the religion, so much must it have been tainted by the religion’s turpitude, decadence, error or mendacity.  But, going back to beginnings, it was possible, in the case of Christianity (and indeed Judaism) to discover a thread of scepticism of the motives of temple-builders.  Where that idea had currency, Christianity could not justifiably claim tradition as a foundation of its Truth.  Perplexingly, this thread of scepticism is to be found in the mind of the church-builder, Alberti.

Whenever human beings believe something important, they, so-to-speak, build a building about it.  To power – to eminence – it has, since the Age of Bronze, been impossible to deny architectural expression and, reciprocally, from architecture it has been impossible to deny rhetoric.  The importance of religion, and its typical activities – petition, adoration and congregational witness – have therefore demanded architecture.  Christianity has been no different.

However, the building of a church has also been accompanied by an anxiety.  Periodically, we come across the thought that in the act, signifying the importance of the deity and announcing our propitiatory self-sacrifice in labouring to raise the structure, Christ has been somehow and perversely betrayed.  Perhaps the religion was not, at first, about power and eminence.  The beginnings of the anxiety are to be found, first, in the tenor of the life of Christ as it emerges through the Gospel story, then in the philosophy of Christianity (as opposed to its tradition) and, at last, in the mythology of the religion’s early history, in the Age of the Common Life.

Indeed, those origins are probably more ancient still – in the various meditations upon loss of innocence and happiness that are embedded in myths of Eden and the Golden Age, when there was no need for architecture.  These are sometimes conscious thoughts, and sometimes they are no more than shadings of feelings.  Both are triggered by promptings that have been left scattered throughout our history, our art, our moral sentiments.  The thought is that we were not meant to be church builders in the literal and material sense. 

This theme is not, essentially, a historical one, for we would not expect the anxiety, present from the very beginnings of Christian self-justification, to be entirely in abeyance at any time.  It will be necessary to quote, below, passages of scripture that intend to be true independently of the passage of time and of historical change.  But to understand the theme better – indeed to see it as a formative notion, making the very material and mental world that Alberti inhabited – the historian’s perspective and method is the most useful and productive to apply. 

Because it was a period of increased self-consciousness, and because the secular and the pagan were taking on significance in the scholarly mind, the Renaissance period in Italy was particularly marked by traces of anxiety about church building.  At the same time, the Renaissance is thought of as a period of particularly energetic and intellectually focussed church-building.  By a paradoxical logic, the anxiety emerges into consciousness in exactly the circumstances and to the degree where the building project is being pursued enthusiastically.  Michelangelo’s famous letter to Ferratino conflating a deficient architecture and a corrupt institution encapsulates the thought particularly well.[i]

The theme is also, of course, a cultural and an anthropological one.  To talk about Alberti, in this context, is also to talk about everyman.  It must be allowed that people are made, morally, by their important stories.  They contribute to culture, and we are cultural constructs to a considerable extent.  Christ’s story is a worm in the brain of everyone who has lived in the Christian parts of the world.

There is an ineluctable historical consideration with which to begin.  It is the observation that Christianity was born out of doors; but everywhere (pace the Salvation Army and similar organisations of Christian first-aiders, and pace stilites too) it finds itself in buildings.  Of buildings, cities are made.

The architectural expression that it usually receives establishes it as crucial to civilisation – that  idea of ours of our world as essentially constructed by us.  Abbot Suger’s St Denis houses the tombs of the Bourbons; St Peter’s in Rome argues the Apostolic Succession.  These are political connections in the obvious sense, both arguing the preeminence of the monarchical principle in civic life, the polis.  The connection of church architecture with the institution’s claims of preeminence in civil society does not need to be laboured.

But, all the while, as will be seen and as, in truth, we acknowledge in the dark hours of self-scrutiny, the spirit moves restively within the bonds of masonry and ritual, and the air becomes fetid in the stoney cell.  These twin and contradictory thoughts – we must build against the eventuality of barbarianism, and we must desist from the confining practice of building- are indicative of doubt and unease at the heart of the religion.

There is the thought that Christ opposed the constraints of the Temple, both the building, and the morality that it fostered – one deferential to theological nicety and punctillious on ritual correctness to the point of petrification of the spirit and denial of life.  St Stephen’s statement that the Church is not made of stone (Acts 7, 44-50) advances the argument.  God’s localisation within the material fabric of a church could seem like a prosaic mind’s evasion of the idea of the universality of the divine and of its spiritual, that is volatile, character; its medium, air, rather than a more stable element.  Alberti’s report in De re aedificatoria of Xerxes’ resistance to imprisoning the gods in temples is not just the noting of Persian eccentricity.  It was a possible if somewhat superstitious thought also in the fifteenth century in Italy: ‘His auctoribus Xerses inflammasse templa Graeciae dicitur, quod parietibus includerent deos, quibus omnia debeant esse patentia, quibusve ipse mundus pro templo sit.’[ii] The anxiety on the point corresponds quite closely with the one that argues for iconoclasm – denouncing the icon as an imprisoning of the deity in an image – a fixing of life.  As we have seen, in Momus, Alberti satirised the epistemological muddle of iconoclasm with a flourish.

Where God is not contained within a temple but is omnipresent, the temple-building itself might be redundant.  That is the mordant point that Libripeta makes in the Intercenale, ‘Religio’.  Lepidus has been delayed at the temple while Libripeta has awaited him under a fig-tree.  Libripeta disparages the temple, the priests and the gods who are supposed to answer prayers.  Lepidus reposts, “Don’t you know that everything is filled with the gods?”, giving Libripeta the opportunity to reply, “Then you could properly have done under this fig tree exactly what, following the superstitious custom of the ignorant, you accomplished in the temple.”[iii]

The church-builder –materially or institutionally- must, to some extent, have in mind the Christ of the Gospel story.  The narrative, once it is considered as a set of choices, sees grand architecture rejected from the very beginning.  It was a stable, not an inn.  Later, Christ could have taken the professional route; he familiarised himself with the ways of the Doctors in the Temple; the life of the pharisee was, we are led to presume, open to him.  But then he went on to preach in informal surroundings.  The Temple that he found towards the end of the story required a radical cleansing.  His expulsion of the money-changers was implicitly a denunciation of a corrupt institution.  There is no admirable building here.

Other Gospel stories can also be read as indications of Christ’s preference for places unvisited by priests.  He can be construed as having an aversion to enclosure.  The earlier part of the story of the Passion is acted out in terms of restaint and escape.  The place of prayer is the Garden of Gethsemane, not the temple.  The bitterness of confinement in the hands of Pilate and Ciaphas is accentuated by the contrast with the place of prayer and arrest.  At the beginning of the Ministry, the Baptism takes place before witnesses, the Holy Spirit and the voice of God, as well as the priest, John, and the neophytes, in open air.  All are present – the congregation is complete – and there is no building.  The story has it that Christ has come to the same place as Moses.  And, just as Moses did not pass over Jordan, but remained in the desert place, so Christ turned back from paradise to perform his ministry.  Piero della Francesca’s picture of The Baptism conforms with the iconographic norm, but is especially effective in gathering the angels on one side of the river and the neophytes on the other, so that the observer can see very clearly that Christ’s next move is away from the angels’ side and from the beatitude they promise.  It is an opting for the desert rather than the heavenly city.

The Old Testament is itself ambiguous in the view of building that it imparts to the potential architect.  From the Christian point of view, the inspiring part of the story of the Israelites is Exodus.  It tells of a testing time and its transit.  The human life and the promise of paradise are framed perfectly in the ancient narrative of the testing of a whole people.  The salvation of the Children of Israel needed no more than a good shepherd, a covenant and a spare code of law.  Architecture had no role to play in this most important episode.  When Alberti’s remarks that ‘Moses is praised for being the first to gather his entire nation into a single temple’[iv], he is forcing the idea of an essential rather than a material one.  There was no building in Sinai.  St Stephen is reported as making the same point in Acts 7: ‘47 But Solomon built him a h[v]ouse. 48 Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, 49 Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest? 50 Hath not my hand made all these things?’  Alberti is thinking of a place of assembly rather than confinement.  Moses was a special kind of shepherd, for he had a special kind of flock.  Moses created a metaphorical sheepfold, a sanctuary for the laws.  The material structure was tented and impermanent.  Moses’ action in fostering piety was the gathering together of the flock by the good shepherd in the creation of the true temple.[vi]  St Stephen too takes the point that the pastoral has primacy over the sacerdotal role.

Here, Alberti discloses a nostalgia for pre-architectural times.  Moses’ temple can only have been a space (a ‘platform’ – Alberti’s most primitive architectural element).  Moses’ action was in contrast to those of the clergy and moral teachers of his own age.  ‘Et nostros non audeo improbare  pontifices morumque magistratos, si consulto spectaculorum usum prohibere.’[vii]  He goes on to consider games and theatrical performances.  ‘I am inclined to believe that the ancient race of men, that first began to cut the figure of Janus upon their brazen coins, were content to stand to see these sort of games under some beech or elm, according to those verses of Ovid, speaking of Romulus’s ‘show’.

His play-house, not of Parian marble made,

Nor was it spread with purple sails for shade.

The stage with rushes or with leaves they strew’d:

No scenes in prospect, no machining god.

On rows of homely turf they sat to see.

Crown’d with the wreaths of every common tree.’

Dryden’s translation [viii]

A ‘scaena sine arte’ has the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.

If church-building is accompanied by ambivalent feeling, the positive view is usually the more prominent in the historiography.  Alberti, especially in De re aedificatoria, had much to say about the beauty and nobility of the Temple, or church.  He observes, for example, ‘No aspect of building requires more ingenuity, care, industry, and diligence than the establishment and ornament of the temple.  I need not mention that a well-maintained and well-adorned temple is obviously the greatest and most important ornament of a city; for the gods surely take up their abode in the temple.  And if we decorate and splendidly furnish the houses of kings and visiting notables, what should we not do for the immortal gods, if we wish them to attend our sacrifices, and hear our prayers and supplications?[ix]  The negative view – the one that makes us read the above passage, alert for irony – is to be found in Momus.  There, Alberti presents a scathing satire on prayer.  The passage in De re aedificatoria is assuredly not to be taken at face value.  At its centre is the statement that ‘the gods surely take up their abode in the temple (Deorum equidem certe est diversorium templum.).’  That certe alerts the reader to question the argument of the passage.

In Momus, Book IV, there is a criticism of architecture, specifically the theatre, where the gods have come and where they disguise themselves as statues.  When Gelastus conducts Charon there, the latter is unimpressed by the building: it does not compare, he says, with the flowers in their beauty.[x]  The reader will be put in mind of the ‘lilies of the field’: ‘Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’[xi]  Like the theatre-builder, the temple-builder is mocked by Nature.  Gaudy ostentation and corruption seems to find theur home in architecture in Juno’s harrang of Jupiter in Book II of Momus: ‘You’ve handed out golden palaces, doors, roofs, golden stairs, gilded columns, gilded architraves, walls painted with gold and studded with jewels to whom you liked, while you overlook and neglect your wife.’ [xii] Equally, it might be remarked, there is an architecture of extreme garishness and extravagance made as offering by mortals to God.   It was, to Alberti, reprehensible. The Temple of Solomon itself is perhaps a lesser thing than the temple of Moses.  The implication could be taken from a passage in St Stephen’s sermon in the Acts of the Apostles:

Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as he had appointed, speaking unto Moses, that he should make it according to the fashion that he had seen.  Which also our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles, whom God drave out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David;  Who found favour before God, and desired to find a tabernacle for the God of Jacob.  But Solomon built him an house.  Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet,  Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest? 
Hath not my hand made all these things?(7:44-50)

Expressed here is what may be called an anti-architectural sensibility.  The point is made again, in 17:24, where Paul says to the Athenians, ‘God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands…’ Alberti, like the Gospel writers, is subject to it.  In the Renaissance period, it seems to have emerged into some prominence.  Of the visual arts, painting was an especially effective instrument of its expression.  Naturalism – the proposition that the laws of nature are in operation in the world depicted – came to be the guiding principle of painting.  Of course, there survived a content for painting, especially religious painting, that frequently told of episodes of the suspension of the laws of nature;  and the collision often produced great creative energy.  But naturalism always has the effect of throwing into relief the unnatural or the supernatural; of exposing them as illogical, and even of ridiculing them.  In other words, naturalism has a polemical character, a tendency to evangelistic rejection of alternatives.  As it opposes the unnatural and the supernatural, it also opposes the artificial.  Now, it is true that one of its favourite tools was the mathematically rigorous one-point perspective method, and that method could display its effectiveness very well in laying out architecture in pictures.  But an important point to assert is that it does not applaud the architecture in itself (plan and elevation do that) so much as reveal its dependency upon the sculpting power of light and its visible subjection to the perspective rule.  The sensibility in favour of Nature is suspicious of architecture.

There is a painting that happens to be in the National Gallery of Scotland that expresses the sensibility well and can be used an example. [excuse the abandonment of respectable historical method –deference to chronology, or else remove]  Raphael’s roundel of the Holy Family does not receive nearly enough attention in any case.  It is compositionally and iconographically unusual within Raphael’s oeuvre in the years between 1505 and 08.  The thought that engendered it did not perhaps open onto exciting possibilities of elaboration –at least not directly.  But, in itself, much thought comes together.

The picure is about stopping on a journey and about reenactment.  The scene is a Rest on the Flight into Egypt.  In sentiment it is exceptionally bold, involving as it does an action and its contradiction simultaneously.  Joseph kneels before the Child, proferring a handful of wild stawberries that he has collected.  The Child (and the Madonna) look very intently at Joseph who casts down his eyes.  The contrast of looking and, in humility, forebearing to look is pointed.  At the same time as Christ receives the gift, a gap of sympathy is opened up, for he remembers a previous gift-giving.  It was that of the Magi, when his own true identity was acknowledged.  And, shockingly, the child must now rejects his ostensible parent.  In making the gift, Joseph puts himself outside the circle of child and maternal parent.  This is no pater familias with his due dignity.  The action is painful and beautiful at the same time.  With hindsight, the Adoration of the Magi had been tragic for Joseph.  And where they had given rich gifts, for the king and the priest, Joseph gives a gift at once simple and priceless to a human child.  Architecturally, the action is a stepping-back and retreating across the threshold on the part of Joseph.  He opts to be the stranger.  His staff, which is so prominent, alludes even to his removal from the scene and his adoption of the life of the pilgrim.  It is as if a curse has been laid upon him by Joachim.  This is perhaps to go rather too far: afterall, he too will go up to Jerusalem and lose the Child, to find him later among the Doctors.  And that happens later.  But Joseph’s recognition of the gulf between himself and the Child is crucial.  It is almost Augustinian.  The formal use of the staff, together with the sculpturally implausible but dramatically effective use of the winding band makes the calculation of that gap an act of precison.  Staff and band are like Alberti’s extrinsic rays.  The architectural corollary is at the door of the porch rather than that of the cella.  Joseph will return to the world, and will testify by his conduct to the fact that he was a true witness.  The picture contemplates the universal priesthood. Joseph, we could say, is the first priest of the new religion.  But he is a priest in his separation not his connectedness with God.  The person who is separated has the strongest story to tell.  It is as if Raphael has reconfigured the story of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt in the spirit of St John’s Gospel, where the question of belief in the absence of direct witness is a pressing concern.  The sympathies of the patron of this picture were with pastoral and not conventual religion.  A sympathiser with the Brethern of the Common Life would admire it.

It is possible to say that this picture is, in an important sense, typical.  Its emphatic setting in Nature and its argument for a Christianity on the road connect it with any number of paintings that, since the fourteenth century and especially since the invention of the one-point perspective system, located the scene frankly outside the church (or, in this case, chapel) in which the material object actually found itself.  Pictures had been of the Madonna in heaven.  She was also in the church as a manifestation or as a polychromed bas-relief sculpture of herself rendered by the art of painting.  When we ask where the Madonna is situated, as we look at Duccio’s Maestà, for example (it need not be the Madonna and it need not be a Maestà), we get an answer that honours the church building as a holy place.  That is not the case of pictures with opened backgrounds.  Transitional images like, say, the San Marco Altarpiece of Fra Angelico embody an exquisite tension: everything belongs to someplace else than the church until, behind the trees, we come to the gold ground.  It is there for the sake of convention, but it does not give an air of richness or the celestial to the altarpiece; its size and shape as a patch have been so completely dictated by the representational elements of the scene, that it is merely an echo of gold.  It is even faintly ridiculous.  Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi for S. Donato a Scopeto happens unequivocally in history and geography.  As a consequence, the church building loses its property of enclosure, and its role as gateway to salvation is weakened.

When Christianity became a religion whose origins were considered to be predominantly in historical time (as opposed to a revelation of eternal verity), the gospel story assumed once again crucial importance.  The piety became principally an imitative one – the imaginative reliving and witnessing of the great events of the period of the Incarnation.  The piety of petition, which Alberti criticised so severely in Momus and elsewhere in his writings, might have use of an intercessor.  The piety of veneration required an icon and a suitable place in which to be housed.  The priestly institution that was necessary to the one and the enshrining that belonged to the other argued for the building, institutionally and materially, of a church.  The imitative piety had no such insistent requirement.  What it needed most was the story itself.  Alberti, when he called the affecting picture, the creation of which was the subject of his treatise, De pictura, the historia, was providing the instrument of the piety that was informed by the thread in Judeo-Christian thought that harboured a suspicion of the temple and church. If there would continue to be an institution and a building, the church that Alberti, the architect, would have to design would be configured functionally

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[i] See P. Portoghesi, Architettura del Rinascimento a Roma (Electa: Milan, 1979), pp.209-11, Letter of Michelangelo to Bartolomeo Ferratino, 1555: ‘E non si può negare che Bramante non fusse valente nella architettura, quanto ogni altro che sia stato dagli antichi in qua.  Lui pose la prima pianta di Santo Pietro, non piena di confusione, ma chiara e schietta, luminosa a isolata attorno, in modo che non nuoceva a cosa nessuna del palazzo; e fu tenuta cosa bella, e come ancora è manifesto; in modo che chiunque s’è discostato da detto ordine di Bramante, come a’ fatto il Sangallo, s’è discostato dalla verità; [e se così è, che a’ occhi non appassionati, nel suo modello lo può vedere.]  Lui con quel circolo che è (sic) fa di fuori, la prima cosa toglie tutti lumi a la pianta di Bramante, e non solo questo, ma per se non a ancora lume nessuno: e tanti nascondigli fra di sopra e di sotto, scuri, che fanno comodità grande a infinite ribalderie; come tener segretamente sbanditi, far monete false, impegniar monache e altre ribalderie, in modo che la sera, quando detta chiesa si serrasi, bisognerebbe venticinque uomini a cercare chi si restassi nascosto dentro, [e con fatica gli troverebbe in modo starebbe].’

[ii] Rykwert et al, VII,2, p.193: ‘This is what persuaded Xerxes, so it is said, to burn down the temples in Greece, on the basis that the gods ought not to be enclosed by walls, but everything should be open, and the world should serve as their temple.’; Orlandi L’Architettura,  p.543.  It is necessary to acknowledge that this passage puts the reader to the test of catching Alberti’s true voice.  The immediately preceeding passage recounts how the temple was roofed in straw and reeds, even in the city’s flourishing condition, in honour of ancient frugality.  However the practice changed when princes and wealthy citizens roofed their buildings magnificently and, it seeming disgraceful that the temple should be more poorly clad, the temple was made magnificent.  Alberti claims to be vehemently in favour of the change (ibid.). But his praise of frugality is habitual, as is his disdain of ostentation.  A heavily sardonic tone is perhaps to be found here.

[iii] Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces, a translation of the Intercenales by David Marsh, Binghampton, New York, 1987, p.19. Girolamo Mancini, Opera Inedita et Pauca Separatim Impressa, Sansoni, 1890, p.129: “Ergo et hic sub hac ficu apte idipsum poteras, quod supersitiosa quorundam imperitorum consuetudine effecisti in templo.”

[iv]Rykwert et al, VIII.7, p.268; ’Moysem laudant, qui unico in templo gentem omnem suorum convenir solemnibus et commessationes statutis temporibus inter se concelebrare instituit.’ Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.725

[v]

[vi] Exodus, 25-27 and 35-40, Samuel, 2:1, Chronicles, 1:17

[vii] Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.725

[viii] Rykwert, VIII,7, pp.175-6. Leone’s version misses out a reference to the Sabines: ‘Ludos ego bonam illam posteritatem, quae Ianum signabat in aere, facile crederim spectasse sub fago aut sub ulmo stantem. “Primus sollicitos – inquit Naso – fecisti, Romule, ludos, Cum iuvit viduos rapta Sabina viros.  Tunc neque marmoreo pendebant vela theatro, Nec fuerant liquido pulpita rubra croco.  Illic, quas tulerant nemorosa Palatia, frondes Simpliciter positae, scaena sine arte fuit.  In gradibus sedit populus de cespite factis, Qualibet hirsutas fronde tegente comas.”’(Orlandi, p.727)

[ix]Rykwert et al,  VII, 3, p. 194; Orlandi, L’Architettura, p. 543: «Tota in re aedificatoria nihil est, in quo maiore sit opus ingenio cura industria diligentia, quam in templo constituendo atque exornando.  Sino illud, quod templum quidem bene cultum et bene ornatum profecto maximum et primarium est  urbis ornamentum.  Deorum equidem certe est diversorium templum.  Quod si regibus et magnis viris hospitibus aedes ornamus lautissimeque apparamus, quid superis immortalibus faciemus, quos quidem adesse vocatos ad sacrificium et nostras audire preces supplicationesque volumus?»

[x] Knight and Brown, Momus, IV, 48, p.312/313

[xi] Matthew, 6:26; Luke, 12:27

[xii] Knight and Brown, Momus. II, 27, p.114-16/115: ‘Tu aeses auro, tu fores, tecta, gradusque auro, aureas columnas, aurea epistylia, parietes auro gemmisque pictos ac redimitos quibus visum est condonasti, uxore praeterita et neglecta.’