[Palmieri (Vita Civile) and Alberti (Momus and elsewhere) express their opposition to salvation as humankind’s end.  It is selfish.  It is inconsistent with altruism, amicizia and love.  To act for the sake of one’s salvation must surely be sinful. Salvation must not be the moving cause, though it may very well be the consequence of action that is for the sake of others.  Christ’s own act is here to be imitated.  The thinking is no different from Paul’s and Luther’s. Thus, Alberti can be thought a figure of the proto-Reformation.]

Alberti’s view of the Church was a critical one.  The other thread that runs through his thinking about religion is philosophical.  It is his doubt.  He seems to have been sceptical of many parts of doctrine, and to have subscribed only to a very pared-down version of the religion.  Moreover, that scepticism seems sometimes to have flirted with atheism.  At first, it might seem that such thinking could only represent a crisis for a church architect.  Certainly, such thought would seem to occupy the gap that is the subject of this book, that between the thought  proclaimed and argued, and the built work.  Hypocrisy can be the solution to the problem of being of two minds.  It remains to be seen if, as a church architect, he betrayed his own philosophy.

In the absense of religion, does there remain any spiritual content to life?  Or, is there a spiritual quality to life outside of or alongside religion?  For Renaissance students of non-Christian culture, it became clear that the absence of ‘true’ religion had had no very deleterious effect upon spirituality.  And moral life, which is the part of spiritual life that dwells among men, was as studied in pagan antiquity (to say nothing of the infidel present in Greece, Constantinople and the Holy Land) as in the Christian era.  Alberti, the humanist, had evidence before him that made it impossible to draw a line between Christianity and paganism coinciding with a line between the moral and the immoral and between the spiritual and the godless.  The Christian, the pagan and the secular existed on a plane now without the old divisions.  The moral fabric extended in all directions, indifferent to them.

Alberti’s purpose was, very importantly, to undermine categorical rigidities, especially those which sustained a decadent religious institution and an over-wrought theology.  The requirement for a dedicated architecture came from clergy and institution: architecture, as always, was an instrument of politics.  A religion, however, that was truly congregational was not so architecturally demanding.  As has been seen, Moses, the shepherd, created a temple out of the essential moral elements, congregation and protection.  It had no permanent material existence.  For Alberti, building provided for human beings conceived in their moral relations.  And, reciprocally, architecture had moral elements, as will be seen below.  The architectural and the moral were metaphorically exchangeable.  So long as architecture embodied its moral elements it would serve no venal master.

Metaphor and simile were essential to Alberti’s moral representation of things.  They enabled him to point out similarities between distant categories and, indeed, to question their integrity and self-sufficiency.  A very good example to give an idea of the force of his use of simile and metaphor is to be found in an ostensibly simple statement in De iciarchia.  He writes, ‘Conviensi presuponere che la famiglia sia un corpo simile a una repubblica composto di te, e di questo, e di tutti voi; e sete alla famiglia come innati instrumenti e membri di questo corpo.’[2]  When he says that a family is like a republic, he makes it possible for matter that is relatively modest and close-to-home to stand for the larger state of things that is perhaps beyond the intellectual horizon of someone without wide education.  Thus, via simile, the small can serve for the larger.  Into the centre of the simile, Alberti inserts a metaphor.  Both family and republic are bodies; and their parts are integral to the whole as is the case with bodies, as opposed to aggregate things.  The metaphor carries an implicit assertion then, that families and republics are more than just comings-together of people; they are constituted according to some rule or other.  Battista explains this property that belongs to bodies as opposed to aggregations, and therefore to families: it is interdependency: ‘…ène el vincolo insolubile in quale l’uno sustenta ed e sustentato dall’altro.’[3]  Armed with this definition of the body in general, he is able to distinguish between the healthy and the unhealthy.  He can thus extend the simile, likening the republic to the successful family and to the healthy body. The ‘corpo sano’ is then likened to  the ‘nave ben composta’[4] which, because it navigates perilous waters in seeking port, gives to the republic and family a goal or destiny.[5]  Wherever ships, families or republics appear in his writings, one of the categories carries the others in its shadow.  Wherever there are bodies – buildings for example – their principles of cohesion coincide with those that prevail in the human relations of a family and the political ones of a republic.

When a metaphor reveals its own mechanics it is, in effect a simile.  Adovardo in Book IV of De familia offers a moral-architectural one, with a telling quasi: ‘If, as Cicero wrote to his brother, the face and visage be [‘quasi’] the door of our spirit and entrance thereto, let it never fail to be open to all, liberal and public of spirit.’ [6]

Battista says, in De iciarchia, ‘E dicono che la prudenza si è un muro tutissimo, quale non si può con macchine prosternere, né con perfidia e tradimento superare.’  Its foundation is ‘la buona mente’.[7]  The metaphor as again so plain as to be like a simile.

Alberti’s habit of using simile and metaphor means that the reader becomes alert to hidden metaphor.[8]  That is, a discussion can function perfectly well within its literal terms; but a reader attuned to Alberti’s most insistent themes will find his metaphorical meanings applicable to the case.  The terminology of the house and building, that comes so readily to Cicero’s and Adovardo’s minds, is used in this way.  Metaphor is not so much hidden as made the object of a puzzling game in the Intercenales.  For example, Templum sees the stones of the building’s foundation given animation.  They rail against the laboursomeness and indignity of their task of upholding the superstructural elements, and rise up in revolt, with the result that the temple collapses.  By the stones, the audience is to understand social inequality (and see the futility of simple rebellion).  Hedera tells of ivy dislodging the stones of the temple.  Probity itself, we understand, is prey to unrestrained rapacity.  As has been seen, Momus had disguised himself as ivy, in order to break into the temple and rape Praise.  Suspitio is about a plant growing on an altar, stifling the sacred fire lit there.  So far, the image is architecturally and ritualistically possible.  As allegory, its leaves and branches assault all who would attempt to restrain it.  Only at the base of its trunk is it vulnerable, for it has no roots.  Grasped low down, it may be taken from the altar and out into the light.  Then it disappeared, for it was suspicion; it thrived in darkness and died in the light of candour.[9]  These stories function as fables.

The basic parts of the church building furnished Alberti with moral correlative terms in De familia.  He wrote,

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 ricambiate?[10]

It is an ambitious passage, in which Alberti nearly achieves an integration of the functions of a building’s parts with a moral structure for society and Vitruvius’s categories for architecture.  The basilica or temple is composed of three elements; roof, walls and ornaments. Via simile, they represent moral roles for the building understood as an institution.  The roof is a matter of architectural necessity, providing shelter from the elements, specifically rain.[11]  It belongs in the category of firmitas.  The walls are both necessary and socially functional.  They too defend, this time against wind.  But they also serve as a barrier between the sacred and the profane (not necessarily perhaps the religious and the secular).  They are things of commoditas.  Urban space could also function as a barrier between the sacred and profaneIn Book VII, Chapter 3, he wrote, ‘Demum, ubi templum colloces, esse oportet celebre illustre et, uti loquuntur, superbum, et ab omni profanorum contagio expeditum.  Ea re pro fronte habebit amplam et se dignam plateam, circuetur stratis laxioribus vel potius plateis disnissimis…’ (Orlandi, p.549; Leitch, p.195)  Walls and surrounding space have common purpose in segregating the temple.  Alberti amplified his thinking about walls in Book VII, Chapter 1 of De re aedificatoria.  The ancients, he notes, dedicated the walls of their cities to gods: ‘The walls were therefore considered particularly sacred, bacause they served both to unite and to protect the citizens.’  As for the city, so for the temple.  The passage has served as preface to discussion of the temple: ‘Who would consider a temple as anything but sacred?’[12]  It would be an innane question were the reader not discover there the idea of a social sacredness in city and temple.  The idea of fitness or decorum is also present here.  The ornaments that are appropriate to the building hint at its possession of venustas.  In addition, they are the defining parts of the building whereby it is a basilica as opposed to one of another sort.  Thanks to ornaments or venustas, the basilica stands in its own right over and above need or utility: it has its virtù.  Adovardo has it that the basilica is like friendship. Amicizia too consists in three parts.  That which is necessary – the roof so to speak – is a binding trust.  Acting as a wall, keeping out what might damage friendship is a strong and simple affection.  They are the effective means of maintaining peace and harmony, and resisting envy and hatred.  Corresponding with ornament are the honest courtesies that friends make to one another.  The basilica for Alberti possessed the means to foster true friendship of this kind, as he would later go on to show in De re aedificatoria.  In Adovardo’s speech, morality, architecture and Vitruvius do not yet seem to be fitted with clockwork precision; but Alberti’s intention is clear to see – to establish the analogies.  He used the metaphor of the roof as a moral protection in his late dialogue, De iciarchia.  Battista was admonishing his young listeners: ‘…e addussi loro essemplo che mai sarà chi abiti non male se non pone il tetto, onde e’ seguiti che le perturbazioni de tempi nulla offendino,  e alle estuazioni dell’ animo nostro ambizione e cupidità meno s’accendino.’[13]

The basilica or temple, for Alberti, represents amicizia because amicizia is able to flourish within it very readily.  But amicizia flourished also in other architectural circumstances.  That is, it is also to be found across the boundary between the religious and the secular.  From his understanding of the practices of the Early Christians Alberti took encouragement to undermine the division.  Christian morality is contiguous with domestic morality in light of the fact that the early Christians met in one anothers’ houses.  There, they ate together.  So the altar in the church and the table in the house were much more closely related in Early Christian and Albertian thinking than in later Christian ritual.  Battista, in De iciarchia says: ‘Questo apparecchio e lautizie della mensa ha in sé venerazione, e quasi possiamo dire che la mensa sia come ara sacrata alla umanità, e che ‘l convito sia in parte spezie di sacrificio e religiosa comunione a confederarsi con fermissima carità. E per questo dire’ io che ne’ conviti de’ giovani e’ vecchi vi bisognassero in luogo del sacerdote, come per altro, sì etiam per ornamento del convito.’[14]  Again, there is a quasi establishing the simile.  Moreover, it makes the parallel a measured one.  So, Alberti really does think that the pater familias is like the priest and does think that the familial social communion of the dinner table is like altar service in church, if the latter is properly conceived.  When Adovardo’s statement is supplied with historical justification, it becomes clear that, for Alberti, the secular world does not derive moral and spiritual value from the religious, but the other way about: religion is reenactment, in abstracted conditions, of the virtuous part of the common life.  Around the table, intercourse is frequent and virtuous.  Later on in De iciarchia, Battista notes how, at table, a sort of media aurea persists.  The young are less boisterous and the old are less grave.  They adapt to one another: ‘Ecci al bisogno nostro questa adattezza competente e conveniente all’uno e all’altro, ch’e’ vecchi si ritrovino spesso co’ giovani in lieta familiarità, massime alle cene. Non so donde sia che questo trastullo del motteggiare in mensa concili tanta grazia e domestichezza.’[15]  In claiming not to know how this conviviality, he invites the reader to offer an explanation.  Along with the equality of fraternity, that almost exists at this table (for the monarchy of the pater familias oversees proceedings) these are the parts of amicizia as explained in Book IV of De familia.

The person who, in Alberti’s writings, exemplifies Christian virtue in the secular world of the family and the republic is his kinsman Giannozzo in De familia.  In Book III, Giannozzo talks at length to young Battista and Carlo, with Lionardo often translating his pronouncements into loftier terms, about maserizia, the economic running of the family.  As such an exemplar, Giannozzo embodies Early Christianity reborn.  It is Giannozzo who perhaps most easily inhabits simile as a way of thinking, for the consequence of his virtue is that he evaluates all things in a moral light and therefore does not distinguish between the material and the spiritual, the particular and the general.  He himself is a simple uneducated man, as he repeatedly tells his interlocutors.  He does not deal in abstractions.  Yet, when he considers worldly things they become transfigured into something nobler.  When he says, ‘Vorrei tutti i miei albergassero sotto uno medesimo tetto, a uno medesimo fuoco si scaldassono, a una medesima mensa sedessono’[16], his concern is for the health of the household accounts because: ‘…a due mense si spiega due mappe, a due fuochi si consuma due cataste, a due masserizie s’adopera due servi…’.[17]  However, in light of the passages taken above from De familia and De iciarchia, the hearth, the table and the roof are more than that -–nothing less than moral objects and instruments. Corresponding with Giannozzo’s material and moral economy, under Moses there was one people, one temple and one altar.[18]  The roof is a shelter where people gather in familial terms in De iciarchia, III: ‘Questo simile uso di vivere insieme e ridursi sotto a un tetto si chiama familiarità’.[19]  A family, he explains, is the number of men who do this.  They are also ‘contenuti da un volere.’[20]  The table sees the family coming together in cheerful communion.  In De iciarchia, Alberti treats at length the domestic table, where the elderly are informal, jocund and, one could say, youthful in their conduct.  Whilst normally the young and the old are different from one another in demeanour, they are much alike at dinner.[21]  The picture of familial harmony around the dinner table, where the youth restrains its exhuberance and age puts aside its severity must resemble the early Christian communion. [Get. The quotation from De re needs to go in.)

As it were to emphasise the point, the converse brings bad results.  Being fed at someone else’s table – ‘pasciuti non della cucina sua’- says Alberti in De iciarchia [22](II, p.237, l.30-31), makes people lack probity.  To be a hanger-on at court is to eat another’s bread; to be idle and dishonest: ‘Pasconsi del pane altrui, fuggono la propria industria e onesta fatica.’ (De familia, Furlan, , p309, l.3425-26) The mensa is properly the place of moral instruction and correction.  One’s instructors maintain some sort of vigilance, so that we always think of ourselves as being observed -–applauded and shamed for our conduct.  The table stands for foresight.  The food has to have been stored.  Momus criticises Jupiter for not thinking ahead.  He should do so ‘so that he won’t some day have to live off someone else’s table, as they say.’ ‘…sed sua praesertim sibi vivendum sit (ut aiunt) quadra.’ [23]

Giannozzo explains that the family needs to have have three buildings; a town house, a villa and a bottega.[24]  Lionardo sums up, for Adovardo, what Giannozzo has talked of: ‘Molte più cose: in che modo alla famiglia bisogna la casa, la possessione, la bottega, per avere dove tutti insieme si riducano per pascere e vestire, e come di queste si debba esserne massaio.’[25]  Living together is not just practical, and economically prudent, however.  Adovardo, near the end of Book IV, connects living together in society with moral wisdom, for it is the expression of fellow-feeling: ‘E niuna cosa tanto par propria agli amici, dice Aristotele, quanto insieme vivere’.[26]  In Profugiorum ab aerumna, Alberti advised insistently against solitude, the enemy of peace of mind.[27]

A character that Alberti invents who is the opposite of Giannozzo is Neophronus in the Intercenale, Defunctus.  His case makes Giannozzo’s the clearer by contrast.  Neophronus, in Hades, recounts to Polytropus the many betrayals of his memory that are going on on earth.  Wife, children, household and kinsmen mourn publicly but rejoice privately in his death.  It becomes clear that among his vices was miserliness.  He hoarded rather than used money and goods when appropriate.  Neophronus had placed a hoard, which  he wants his children to have after his death, in a culvert.  Polytropus chides him: ‘You thought your money was safer, not entrusted to a friend, but stored on public land … and exposed to accidents.’  He goes on: ‘Since men were created for men’s sake, who can fail to see that our human duty is to offer our friends and fellow citizens all the aid and assistance that we can.  What shall we think of a man whose avarice or other folly leads him to hide away money which is essential to maintaining the bonds between men and societies? […]  Besides, by what fault does it happen that friendship, the most sublime, holy and, desirable of human relationships, should be valued so little that you trust walls more than friends?’  He had said, ‘Ought we to believe that bricks afford more loyalty, counsel, and diligence, or a surer defense against misfortune than does a friend?’[28]  Here, the equivalence of building and friendship is denied.  If the bricks have more than a material reality, in fact a metaphorical one, within the story, they constitute  the building formed by shared human purposes but by an impersonal institution.  In any case, though, comparability is the basis of the point.  In other words, the simile stands.

Giannozzo would never have acted so foolishly.  The essential economic rule that he adheres to is that money should be spent at the proper time.  Acting in a timely fashion is the skill of a good head-of-family.  The paterfamilias corresponds with the able ship’s captain.  His skill is that he is best-equipped to know how to do what is needed.[29] Wealth should not be frittered away on trivial things; neither should it be hoarded when it can be put to good use.  Among its uses is the assisting one’s friends and making new ones.  A very good example of the pattern of Alberti’s moral thinking, where actions and their moral promptings exist side by side (so that, where we observe the one, we are also to construe the other) and where building, money and amicizia are connected, is to be found in an exchange in De iciarchia: “Disse colui: ‘desidero d’essere ricco solo per murare e donare.’  Degna risposta. Acquistasi col benificare mediante el danaio amici e fama.”[30]( p.14 electronic)  The leaps from donare to amici and murare and fama are rather long, but Alberti does not need to explain the mechanics  of connection.  And, the other way about: ‘Chi desiderasse richezze per non beneficare a persona, sarebbe peggio ch’una fera immanissima.’[31]

Through Giannozzo, Alberti expressed his important aperçu; that the world of practical affairs must be one in which all things seek to be useful.  Money can become morally animated when it can produce labour and reward.  Bricks and mortar can work to husband society reduced to its smallest numerical component, brothers bound in amicizia.  Buildings can gather together families.  And architecture can bind the republic in peace and harmony.  Florence Cathedral could ‘cover with its shadow the whole Tuscan people’ in a gesture reminiscent of early Christianity and Mosaic Judaism.[32]

The description of Florence Cathedral in Profugiorum is very telling.[33] Alberti’s delight in the church is invested with delight in like things.  Simile and metaphor offer him an elision of the virtues of the Madonna and Venus.  Springtime and the joys of villa-living invest the place.  The building represented liberalità.  In its material soundness, it represented a quality that Alberti repeatedly lauded, the ability to endure.  The Cathedral was very instructive for Alberti.  The lessons that he derived from it he could apply elsewhere himself.  An obvious example is the lieto and eterno church of Sant’ Andrea in Mantua.  Eterno and lieto ought to be incompatible in architecture.  They are not in the description of the Cathedral nor in the project for Sant’ Andrea.

In eliding the secular and the religious and setting them both upon a plane of moral judgement –in finding common cause between Giannozzo and church builders– Alberti evaded the debilitating effects of anti-clericalism and doubt.  A religious revival looking to the early Christians would find a clergy not yet corrupted by self-isolating vice –mostly pride– and a faithful not yet in pursuit of individual salvation.  His cultural revivalism, then, does not encounter a watershed where the pagan gave way to the Christian: the culture of the ancient Romans and of the early Christians is to be revived.  Where the decline started was where religious pride and selfishness replaced humility and fellow feeling.  In secular terms, the corresponding point must be where the pomp of empire replaced the frugality of republic.[34]  If this, Albert is of like mind with Poggio Bracciolini who, in his dispute with Guarino da Verona in 1433, deprecated Julius Caesar and the empire he inaugurated as the usher-in of cultural (particularly literary) decline.  Chronologies might not strictly fit, but Alberti’s moral narrative does not set historical change after the model of rigid categories.  Simile and metaphor had always insisted that boundaries could be transgressed.

The table, for Alberti, signifies peace and amity.   Eating clearly separates the Intercenales.  They’re intermezzi.  If ‘table’ is to do with living together so are the intercenales.  There is a literal and material – and necessary – sustenance.  It has a counterpart at the level of virtù.  First, it is moral, consisting in the emotion of conviviality; then it is intellectual.  To find agreement is preliminary to acting in a politically considered manner.

Amicizia is a very prominent concept for Alberti; it is the name in the secular sphere for something equally important in the religious context.  It also corresponds with a law of Nature, concinnitas,  which, in turn, forms human artifacts.  (Concinnitas is a principle of assembly of parts so that they combine harmoniously.  All harmonious assemblies are good –specifically, the family, and the society.  In this way, architecture again has its moral character.)

Here, the building is pressed to serve as a moral emblem.  The question is, does the building, by, as it were, its own will, act morally?  In other words, does the simile order architecture as readily as it orders morality?  The passage shows that it was Alberti’s ambition that it do so.  [This to go below; reciprocally, the building embodies moral values.  Eg. The early Christian basilica and private house.  To go further down; moral values themselves combined in an architectural way.  As last, we can have an odd thing, an architecture-less architecture.  It is made up of the harmonious interactions of societies.]

 

Early Christian use of the domestic place

Family – the building block of civilization

Domestic virtue – the base of Christian virtue

(the moral ‘little wooden hut’)

The common meal               Table

For the discussion of Giannozzo as a husband, see Intercenale, ‘Maritus’.

Furlan, pp.255-56: ’credete a me, niuno puo durare in alcuna buona fortuna senza spalle e mano degli altri uomini.’

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)

A measure of Alberti’s  robustness of temperament is his writing of De pictura in the light of what Vergerio said in  De ingenuis moribus.  The latter notes that the Greek curriculum was letters, gymnastics, music and drawing.  Alberti (and Vittorino) contradict him on his dismissal of drawing.

Judith Ravenscroft, ‘The Third Book of Alberti’s Della famiglia and its two Rifacimenti’. Italian Studies, Vol 29, 1974, pp.45-53.

On the equation of altar and hearth (making hearth into a unity in faith), see the Intercenale, Suspitio.

On the theme of the good husband not watching over his wife and restraining her freedom for fear of her going astray, see Marriage (p.146) in Intercenales.  Cf De equo animante (it’s dedicated to Piero de’ Medici)

On the etiquette of standing and sitting, see Platina, Vita di Vittorino da Feltre, a cura di Giuseppe Biasuz, Padove, Editoria Liviana, 1948, p.34.  Lodovico and his brothers never ceased to stand in his presence.

On standing and being seated, Cena familiaris:

Francesco    Per confirmare el ditto tuo, Altobianco mio padre spesso mi

              referiva che per darsi quanto e’ doveva simile a’ sua

              maggiori, mai volle essere veduto sedere in publico presente

              messer Antonio cavaliere suo fratello e gli altri, dei quali

              uno * qui dottore e nel numero de’ cherici con offizii

              publici in degnitˆ non ultimo; mai presente, non dico alcuno

              padre e capo di famiglia, ma pi*, presente Lionardo, o

              Benedetto suo fratello consubrino per etˆ maggiore, mai fu

              veduto asedersi. E cos“ noi tutti sempre rendemmo reverenza

              a’ maggiori come a’ padri, e cos“ loro amorono sempre noi

              come figliuoli. (see copy in this computer)

On the young uncovering their heads before their elders, De iciarchia, II, p.17.

See also the beginning of De iciarchia. ‘Adunque su in casa sedemmo presso al foco noi tre, e circa noi stettero que’ giovanni in pié.’

On the family being like a palace, an ornament of the city – De iciarchia (web. p3); ‘,,,nostri maggiori (Alberti) … quali edificorono queste nostre case, onestamento della famiglia nostra e ornamento di questa città.

Here’s another blood a sweat passage.  It’s in De Iciarchia (10 electronic)  Alberti warns against  ‘cure amatorie’, a problem for young people: ‘Quelle cose per quali tutti gli altri espongono el sudore, el sangue, la vita per consequirle e conservarle, tu le getti, e perdi la roba, la liberta, la tranquillita dell’ animo, solo per essere grato, ossequente e subietto a una vile bestiola piena di voglie, sdegno e stizza.’

Sudore                       roba                            grato                           voglia

Sangue                       liberta                         ossequente                sdegno

Vita                             tranquillita                subietto                      stizza

Morality and architecture.  In Profugiorum, we had Florence Cathedral, where una grazia gave rise to una gracilita vezzosa e amenita.  In Book II of De iciarchia, Alberti requires that we have virtu or bonta together with buon costume.  Buon costume is ornament to bonta (which is like concinnitas.  He writes: ‘Diremo cosi: per la bonta l’omo constituisce e afferma in se vera e perpetua tranquillita e quietudine d’animo, e vive a se libero e, quanto sia in se, utile agli altri, contento de’ pensieri suoi, vacuo d’ogni perturbazione. E’ buon costumi forse sono corrispondenti alla virtu come alla sanita del corpo el buon colore, e sono quasi ormamento della virtu, e acquistano all’omo presso agli altri bona grazia.’(Bk.II, 2 elec).  He goes on to another simile; buon costume is like the mature apple, with its full flavour and odour: ‘…cosi il buon costume innato con la matura perfezione della mente, cioe colla virtu, porge di se amenita e grazia.’  The terminology seems to be interchangeable.  The garden is still present.

De iciarchia II, p.17: Gli altri (ie those who are not indifferent to blame) per acquistarsi buona fama e grazia esposero la roba, el sudore, el sangue…’

De iciarcha II 22: talks of the ‘mensa civile’.  ‘Questo apparecchio e lautizie della mensa ha in se venerazione, e quasi possimo dire che la mensa sia come ara sacrata alla umanita, e che’l convito sia in parte spezie di sacrificio e religiosa comunione e confederarsi con fermissima carita.’

Fraternity.  See de iciarchia, p.12, elec.

‘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.’  What could be worse than an excess of altars?  All I can think of is, idols.  Is Alberti implying that, where the example and spirit 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.  But the provocation to the moral imagination was most dramatically present.  The faithful person, like the observer of the historia, is morally responsible.  It is out of my own goodness of heart that I rejoice and weep for others.  The idea that the virtu of God should exist in the material representation is, for him, ridiculous.

In Theogenius, he wrote,  «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…»[35]  This was to contradict the position that allowed Gianozzo Manetti to give the following account of Nicholas V’s motives for church-building:

            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.[36]

Manetti identifies reading and reasoning, speaking and persuading, listening and acquiescing, and listening, seeing and acquiescing as the forms of piety of the learned, the preaching and the congregation.  The addition of spectacle to the words of the preacher strengthen religion among the illiterate.

Matthew (6:6) expresses a distrust of the spectacle of piety and implicitly of its theatre, the church:

          But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when

          thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret;

          and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

---

[1]

[2]Leon Battista Alberti, Opere Volgari , Vol. II, a cura di Cecil Grayson, Bari: Laterza, 1966, De iciarchia , Book III,p.267, lines 16-19.

[3]Ibid., l.25-26

[4]Grayson, II, De iciarchia, Book III, p.268, l.3-4

[5]Grayson, II, De iciarchia, Book III, p.266, l.7-11.  Battista connects the family and the larger grouping in explicit terms: ‘Atto principio a questi ragionamenti sarà intendere qual sia proprio quella qual noi chiamiamo famiglia.  Quanto m’occorre dalla natura, pare a me che la città com’è constituita da molte famiglie, così ella in sé sia quasi come una ben grande famiglia; e, contro, la famiglia sia quasi una picciola città.’  He goes on to draw parallels and differences.

[6]Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.367,ll.1213-16: ‘…se, come dicea Cicerone al fratello suo, el volto e fronte, quali sono quasi porte dell’animo nostro e adito, mai saranno a persone non aperte, e quasi publice e liberali.’

[7] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, II, p.224, l.33-35

[8] De equo animante is an example of a treatise which would be more interesting if it had more than its ostensible sibject.  The Equestian statue is an emblem of command and government.  Equestrianism in itself should be about the same thing, on might suspect.

[9] David Marsh, pp.63-64

[10]Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.377

[11] Alberti described the roof in similar terms in De Iciarchia. The interlocutor, Battista’s, speech is summarized: ‘…addussi loro essemplo che mai sarà chi abiti non male se non pone il tetto, onde e’ seguiti che le perturbazioni de’ tempi nulla offendino…’ Grayson, II, De Iciarchia, Book I, p.189, l.22-23

[12] Leach, p.190

[13] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, Book I, p.189, l.23-25

[14]Grayson, II, De Iciarchia, Book II, p.257-58, l.32-38

[15] De iciarchia, Book II, p.257-58, l.31-2

[16]Ibid., III,1235-1237

[17]Ibid., III, 1273-1275

[18] See above, Impiety 1, note 5, Exodus, 25-27 and 35-40, Samuel, 2:1, Chronicles, 1:17

[19] Grayson II, De iciarchia, III, p.266, l.21-22

[20] Ibid., l.20

[21] De iciarchia, III, p.275, l.24-32; see also II, p.219, l.1-5

[22] De iciarchia, II, p.237, l.30-31

[23] Momus, I, 19, p.16.  Beggary is the consequence of lack of foresight.  In this passage, Alberti gives clear indication of the meaning of his motto Quid Tum, for it has been Jupiter’s inability to think ‘what next?’ that encouraged him to give a dominating role in the universe to Fate and give the gift of Patience to humankind whereby he himself could be defeated.  “How much more suitably the state of the gods could have been governed,’ says Momus, ‘if his [jupiter’s] plans had been pondered  with greater care.’’O quam commodius cum deorum republica ageretur, si maturius pensitarentur.’

[24] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.260

[25] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.301

[26] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.421

[27] Grayson, II, Profugiorum ab aerumna, for example, Book III: ‘Ma perché pare, quando siamo soli, meno possiamo non repetere e’ nostri mali, e quando siamo non soli, più troviamo da consolarci co’ e’ ricordi e ammonimenti di chi ne acolta, però mi piace quel precetto antiquo che in tue infelicità e miserie sempre fugga la solitudine.’ (p.181, l.6-10)

[28] Marsh, p.119

[29] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, III, p.268, l.31-32

[30] De iciarchia, I, p.210, l.13-15

[31] De iciarchia, II, p.227, l.21-22

[32] Grayson, III, Della pittura: ‘…ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti e’ popoli toscani…’p.8

[33] See above [passage at the beginning of Profugiorum]

[34] Alberti wrote of the Roman Republican virtue of frugality: «Cum haec ita essent, placuit regum potentissimorum amplitudinem cum vetere frugalitate coniungere…». .L’Architettura…, ed. cit., VI, 3, p. 455.

[35]Opere volgari, a.c. di C. Grayson, Vol. II, cit., p. 55

[36] Paolo Portoghesi,Rome of the Renaissance,  translated by Pearl Sanders, 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.; Christine Smith and Josepf F. O’Connor, Buidling the Kingdom: Ginnozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona, 2006, p.482. See Carroll 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.