Alberti begins the prologue to Book I of De familia with a very long, emphatically eloquent sentence contrasting in epic terms the glorious past of families and their present ruination, when they are ‘…gittate in tenebre e tempestose avversità.’[2] They end in darkness.  Darkness and light are opposites that, in Alberti’s writings as in those of so many others, frequently stand for moral opposites.  Vice resorts to the one and virtue is plain to see in the other.  It is so conveéntional a view as to be a truism; but Leon Battista Alberti extends the contrast to revealing effect.

Giannozzo Alberti, in Book III of De familia, explains the connection with customary clarity.  He advises against doing anything about whose goodness one has doubts, ‘Imperoché le cose vere e buone stanno da sé allumate e chiare, allegre, scorgonsi invitanti, voglionsi fare.  Ma le cose non buone sempre giaciono adombrate di qualche ville o sozzo diletto, o di che viziosa opinione che sia.  Non adunque si vogliono fare, ma fuggile, sequire la luce, fuggire le tenebre.  La luce delle operazioni nostre sta la verita, stendesi con lode e fama.  E niuna cosa più é tenebrosa nella vita degli uomini quanto l’errore e la infamia.’[3]

This is a commonplace: it is Manichean, the most universal of religions in that so many stand upon the same dualism.  As moral opposites, darkness and light have already taken on metaphoric meaning in Giannozzo’s generally spade-calling mind. At every turn, it seems, darkness and light can be metaphorical characteristics of moral opposites.  Alberti uses it both habitually and deliberately, in many contexts, as an organising principle.  The piazza is light and the place of solitude is dark.  Lionardo lists the social, moral and intellectual qualities of each: ‘Non in mezzo agli ozii private, ma intra le publiche surge la gloria; in mezzo de’ popoli si nutrisce le lode con voce e iudicio di molti onorati. Fugge la fama ogni solitudine e luogo privato, e volentieri side e dimora sopra e’ theatri, presente alle conzioni e celebrita; ivi si collustra e alluma il nome di chi con molto sudore e assiduo studio di buone cose se stessi tradusse fuori di taciturnita e tenebre, d’ignoranza e vizii,’[4]  Light, visibility and social harmony go together in Adovardo’s simile in De familia: ‘E come el pavoncino per essere covato esce in vita fuori donde era nell’uovo inchiuso, cosi l’amore gia nell’animo conceputo piglia spirito ed esce in luce e comune notizia fra chi ama, quando per uso e domestichizza sia bene osservato;…’[5]  There is darkness in the individual life, where confusion reigns and discrimination is uncertain if not impossible.  Leonardo, in Book III of De familia talks of the difficulty of distinquishing between true friends and false ones, in the ‘ombra di fizioni … oscurità di voluntà … tenebre di errori e vizii.’[6] 

By day, the slothful are lie-a-beds, and are transformed in the night into ungoverned and licentious forces of destruction.  The virtuous fit activity and repose to the order of day and night. Albert connects delinquent behaviour and darkness in De iciarchia.  He develops a sort of night-time narrative: ‘L’uscio aperto la notte; chi esce, chi entra ognora forse con qualche furto.’  At dinner they get drunk; they go out and create trouble in town before, rejoicing in their wrong-doing they return home, drink some more, and fall into a stupor.  ‘Le bruttezze e scellerataggine lor comesse la notte ivi mi fastiderebbe raccontarle.  Niuno di loro mai vide levare il sole…’p.201, l.11-13[7] Trails of metaphor hang from that sun.  These people are led by this route into further vices: ‘[to]…conducere con fraudolenza e tradimento persone a farli perdere la roba, l’onore, la vita, vendere l’onesta sua e de’suoi.’p.202, l.7-9[8]  Here is the opposite of that virtue that results in the sacrifice of sweat, goods, life itself for one’s friend, like Giannozzo’s.  The idea that one’s honesty is for sale puts us in mind of the criticism of John XXIII in De familia, where Lionardo Alberti observes: ‘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.’[9]  Battista Alberti explains in De iciarchia that the slothful possess the pernicious vice of gossip.[10]  No act of wickedness is hidden from them.  As it were, they see in the dark.  Day and night are real and metaphorical at the same time.  Clarity opposes obscurantism in philosophy and theology [import text and discussion from below].  The power of light to dispel the evil that thrives in the dark is the subject of the Intercenale ‘Suspitio’.  It is an allegorical fable.  The story is as follows: Truth and Reason are attempting to remove the plant that has grown in the flames on the altar and, with its broad leaves, is threatening to extinguish the fire.  Janus advises that they take it outside.  As soon as it sees the sunlight, it vanishes from sight.  It was Suspicion.[11]   The humus out of which it grew was darkness.

At length, where darkness or light, or vice or virtue are referred to, the reader responds to an unstated injunction to recognise the opposite.  So, for example, the villa is a place of honest work, and, there, all is open:

You cannot praise the farm half as much as it ought to be praised.  It is excellent for our health, helps maintain us, benefits the family.  Good men and prudent householders are always interested in the farm, as everyone knows, and indeed the farm is, first of all, profitable and, second, a source of both pleasure and honor.  There is no need, as with other occupations, to fear deceit and fraud from debtors or suppliers.  Nothing goes on under cover; it is all visible and publicly understood.[12]

The city is therefore, implicitly, the reverse.  Alberti connects health, country activity and sunlight, and contrasting idleness and shade: ‘Vedilo come sieno e’ fanciulli allevati in villa alla fatica e al sole robusti e fermi più che questi nostri cresciuti nell’ozio e nella ombra, come diceva Columella….’ [13]  In giving three for two, however, it is not necessary to spell out the missing contrast, that of country and city. Where moral health is concerned, the reader will readily see where it is to be achieved by applying Alberti’s dialectical schema: ‘E potrà certo l’esercizio non solamente d’uno languido e cascaticcio farlo fresco e gagliardo, ma più ancora d’uno scostumato e vizioso farlo onesto e continente…‘[14]  Fresco, galiardo, onesto and continente describe the country life very well.  The terms are close to those that he used in the voice of Lionardo: ‘La villa sola sopra tutti si truova conoscente, graziosa, fidata, veridica.’[15]  Elsewhere in Alberti’s writings might come confirmation of his negative thoughts about aspects of city-living; but, in the light of his insistent dialectical way of thinking and expressing himself, the actual pronouncement is not necessary for the point to be made.

If oppositions rank themselves metaphorically under the banners of dark and light, a further effect is achieved for the reader in terms of simile. Alberti is able to establish guilt and innocence not just by association but also by moral parallel.  Darkness, vice, dwelling in the night, inhabitation of cellars, sloth, indiscipline, riot etc. all appear under the same heading. The piazza, the place of light and openness is where social human beings congregate.  The metaphor, the reality and the morality are all present implicitly in his observation that the solitary life is to be avoided.  The person who keeps his own company cultivates his own vices: ‘Diventasi, adunque così per solitudine coniunta con ozio, pertinace, vizioso e bizzaro.  Voglionsi adunque e’ garzoni dal primo dí usarli tra gli uomini ove e’ possino imparare piú virtú che vizio…’ [16]  Even in De equo animante, the negative effects of a life lived in darkness and isolation are traced.  But then, the treatise is not only about the horse,  The horse and rider stand in relation of ruler and subject, and Alberti is treating the question of government.  He writes: ‘We shan’t omit to say that we understand, then, that if it remain inactive for a long time, especially in a dark stable, the horse will become completely incapable of action, and, to all noises, even little ones, and all objects that one presents to his unexpecting vision, nervous, timorous and unable to move.’[17] Alberti would not directly charge the scholastic philosopher with viciousness; but in terms of the schema, the moral companions of the scholar who favours the obscure alleyways of speculation are the spirits of darkness.   There is a kind of idle philosophising that happens in the dark: ‘Queste adunque simili scolastice e diffinizioni e descrizioni in ozio e in ombra fra’ litterati non nego sono pure ioconde…’[18]  In setting ozio together with darkness, Alberti is rehearsing the same basic idea that appears above, in De Iciarchia.[19]  The implicit simile is irresistible: “as in, so in…”  In this case, the turpitude of a slothful and dissolute person cannot but infect our view of the scholastic philosopher.  The clue is that he lives easefully in obscurity.  This way of working and talking allows Alberti to treat matters in very abbreviated terms.  The clergyman who would not make himself visible, expose himself to the public gaze, could be thought to be attempting to evade scrutiny. [20]  Indeed, what else is there to be said of the man who will not pass among his fellows in the piazza?  And just as the churchman should be accessible as pastor and as theologian, so the church building should stand with proper dignity in town, admirable to all and available to all: ‘Lastly, the place where you intend to fix a temple, ought to be noted, famous, and indeed stately, clear from all contagion of secular things, and, in order thereunto, it should have a spacious area in its front, and be surrounded on every side with great streets, or rather with noble squares, that you may have a beautiful view of it on every side.’[21] Alberti’s dialectical method does what he, in an indicative voice, could not do.[what am I saying?]

There is another dialectical opposition that Alberti lays down that is at the core of his thinking about church architecture.  It is that the church consists, crucially, of two parts, the portico and the cella.[22]  The one is the province of the faithful and their pastors.  The other is the preserve of the clergy.  The image is the ancient temple, perhaps the Pantheon.  In the typical church building of post-antique Christian era, the parts would be the nave and the sanctuary.  Alberti supplies the nave – the part that belongs intrinsically to the basilica – with ample light.  There, the Word may be read and the congregational ideal of mutual fortification of virtue may take place.  The other part, the sanctuary, Alberti explains in De re aedificatoria, will be dark: ‘…et habere in templis, quae animos a meditatione religionis et varia sensus illectamenta et amoenitates avertant, non convenit.’[23]

Is it possible to set aside the moral opposition of dark and light that Alberti has been so focussed and insistent upon in the rest of his writings and take his statement here at face value?  It is true that this passage does not give away, by any obvious shift of tone or deliberate logical discontinuity, a sign that the space was to be thought the resort of any but the virtuous.  But, considered in the broader context of Alberti’s writings and in terms of this favoured argumentative method, the space as described does provoke thoughts that it is an ironical voice that, so equably, would have relief statuary or panel paintings, and inspiring inscriptions, all conducing to philosophical wisdom.[24]  Turning away from nature and society in favour of solitude and knowledge of what is beyond nature is consistently rejected in Alberti’s writings.  The superiority of the portico seems so self-evident within Alberti’s moral philosophy.[25]

In De re aedificatoria, VII,10, Alberti says what figurative material he would have in the portico, and what in the cella.  It would be relief-sculpture in the cella.  But all must must inspire philosophical wisdom.  He tells a story from Pliny, that the Roman laws were inscribed on bronze tablets in the Capitol.  It was burned down, after which Vespasian restored the plaques.  There were three thousand of them.  In De iciarchia, Battista inveighs against the modern proliferation of laws.[26] The Romans and the early Christians had got by with small numbers.  Why then their modern proliferation?  The reader is to suspect that the secrecy in which the tablets were held at the Capitol allowed a tyrannical ruler to increase illicitly the number of infractions of which the citizens might be guilty.  The next story is of there being inscriptions at the entrance to the shrine of Apollo at Delos giving instruction in how to prepare a herbal potion that would be an antidote to all poisons.  Since such an antidote cannot exist, the credibility of the god must be called into question.[27] Vespasian’s action acquires a taint of association. Alberti regarded the proliferation of laws as a bad thing.  In De iciarchia, Battista Alberti observes that ten commandments were sufficient for the Hebrews and twelve, effecively, for the ancient Romans.[28]  The reader is no doubt to recall, aside from the Beatitudes (Matt.5) the one prime law that Christ laid down (Matt.22.37).  The smaller the number, the better.

If the darkness of the place were consistent in terms of Alberti’s customary metaphor, it is not a darkness of virtue.  That would be impossible.  Its familiar inhabitants were kin with other spirits of dark, unscrutinised and obscure places.  Light is a fundamental requirement in Alberti’s church literally and, in the institution, metaphorically.  The church must embody the institution and thus be a true image of its virtue.  Alberti creates a little allegorical fable in order to make the point.  Light, purity, virtue and the wonderment of creation are the themes of his Apologo XVI.  A glass vessel filled with water stands on the altar and the sunlight is transformed into a rainbow.  The water congratulates itself on its purity, and the vessel on its cleanliness.  The altar is happy to acknowledge that the gift of the rainbow is owing to the contribution of both.  The water refers to Nature, the vessel to practical morality.  Through them, God (Sol/Apollo) demonstrates to Man his benignity and reason – the beauty of the rainbow.[29]

De iciarchia, Book I, p.214, l.27-29: ‘Nella vita dell’omo lo essercitarsi in qualunque cosa rende la via ad acquistarvi lode e fama ogni di piu aperta, equabile e luminosa.’

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[1]

[2] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.3, l.1-15

[3] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.210, l.519-27

[4] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.226, l. 967-75

[5] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.378-9, l.1512-6

[6] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.296, l.3061-3

[7] Leon Battista Alberti, Opere Volgari , Vol. II, a cura di Cecil Grayson, Bari: Laterza, 1966, De iciarchia p.201, l.11-13. He perhaps recalls a passage in Columella’s preface to De re rustica: ‘we spend our nights in licentiousness and drunkenness, our days in gaming or sleeping, and account ourselves blessed by fortune in that we behold neither the rising of the sun nor its setting.’ http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Columella/de_Re_Rustica/Praefatio*.html

[8] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, p.202, l.7-9

[9]Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, 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.’

[10] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, p.200

[11] See above, Impiety 1, David Marsh, pp.62-64

[12] Renée Watkins, p.192; Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.246, l.1549-1557: ‘Tu non potresti lodare a mezzo quanto sia la villa utile alla sanità, commoda al vivere, conveniente alla famiglia.  Sempre si dice la villa essere opera de’ veri buoni uomini e giusti masari, e conosce ogni uomo la villa in prima essere di guadagno non piccolo, e, come tu dicevi, dilettoso e onesto.  Non ti conviene, come negli altri mestieri, temere perfidia o fallacie di debitori o procuratori.  Nulla si fa in oscuro, nulla non veduto e conosciuto da molti…’

[13] Tenenti, Romano, Furlan, p.60, l.1303-5

[14] Tenenti, Romano, Furlan, p.61, l.1346-47

[15] Tenenti, Romano, Furlan p. 244, l.1514-5

[16] Tenenti, Romano, Furlan, p.58, l.1253-56.  Alberti also discusses solitude in Profugiorum ab aerumna, Grayson II, Book III, p.181

[17]‘De equo animante’, in Albertiana, Vol.II, 1999, p.225: ‘Neque hoc loco illud praetereundum est quod ex re ipsa prpendimus omne iumentum, siquid stabulo praesertim obscuro otiosum diutius asterit, omnino reddi desidiosum et ad omnes levissimos rumores, ad omnesque obiectas suam praeter spem formas meticulosum, pavidum atque attonitum.’

[18]Tenenti, Romano, Furlan, p.351, l.796-7

[19] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, pp.200-02

[20] Put in passage in De re where invisible clergy are criticized.

[21] Orlandi, L’architettura, VII,3

[22] On the Art of Building…, tr. J. Rykwert et alii, cit., VII, 4, p.196; L’Architettura..., a.c. di G. Orlandi, cit. p. 549: «Templi partes sunt porticus et cella interior…»

[23] Rykwert et al, VII, 10, p.220; Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.609

[24] Rykwert et al, VII, 10, p.220: ‘I strongly approve of patterning the pavement with musical and geometric lines and shapes. so that the mind may be receive stimuli from every side.’; ‘Maximeque pavimentum refertum velim esse lineis et figuris, quae ad res musicas et geometricas pertineant, ut ex omni parte ad cultum excitemur.’ (Orlandi, L’Architettura, II, p.611)

[25] Orlandi, L’Architettura, VII, 10, p.611

[26] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, II, pp.262-63

[27] Orlandi, L’Architettura VII, 10, p.611

[28] De iciarchia , Grayson, II, p.262-63

[29] L.B. Alberti, Apologhi, a cura di Marcello Ciccuto, testo latino a fronte, Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, Milan, 1989, Apologo XVI, p.76: ‘Sol ex calice vitreo pleno aqua irim in ara pinxerat: id sibi opus aqua ad gloriam adscribebat.  Calix contra: “Ni perlucidus essem atque nitidissimus”, inquit, “non extaret.” Haec audiens ara secum ipsa tacita, gloriam sibi illam inherere plurimam gaudebat.”