Like Vitruvius, Alberti thought about the origins of architecture. However, he had a somewhat different story to tell. Whilst Vitruvius (II,1) had told of collaboration in the feeding and shared enjoyment of the fire as the origins of society, Alberti began earlier, with human relations that predated mutually beneficial exchange. Familial relations were of primary importance. He explains that the family is nothing less than society in miniature. ‘E parmi che alla origine della famiglia el primo assesso fu amore, e indi el primario vinculo a contenerli insieme fu pietà e carità e certo officio richiesto dalla natura verso e’ suoi.’[1] It follows that the roles of the sexes were therefore of primary significance in Alberti’s pre-history. He wrote, in De familia:
Families increase in population no differently than do countries, regions, and the whole world. As anyone who uses his imagination will quickly realise, the number of mortal men has grown from a small number to the present almost infinite multitude through the procreation and rearing of children. And, for the procreation of children, no one can deny than man requires woman. Since a child comes into the world as a tender and delicate creature, he needs someone to whose care and devotion he comes as a cherished trust. This person must nourish him with diligence and love and must defend him from harm. Too much cold or too much sun, rain, and the wild blowing of a storm are harmful to children. Woman, therefore, did first find a roof under which to nourish and protect herself and her offspring. There she remained, busy in the shadow, nourishing and caring for her children. And since woman was busy guarding and taking care of the heir, she was not in a position to go out and find what she and her children required for the maintenance of their life. Man, however, was by nature more energetic and industrious, and he went out to find things and bring what seemed to him necessary. Sometimes the man remained away from home and did not return as soon as his family expected. Because of this, when he came back laden, the woman learned to save things up in order to make sure that if in the future her husband stayed away for a time, neither she nor her children would suffer.[2]
Lionardo, in Book III, also distinguishes the basic tasks of men and women: ‘It is as though nature has thus provide for our well-being, arranging for men to bring things home and for women to guard them.[3] In his account of the duties of his young wife, – ever practical – Giannozzo makes her the custodian of the house and household.[4] In these passages, Alberti gives credit for the invention of the two basic buildings of the Silver Age to the Mother. Shelter is needed by the post-nomadic species, and a store assures that it can be self-sufficient over an extended period of time. The maternal principles – protection and nourishing – are the beginning of architecture. The mother is, indeed, a metaphorical building, seeing to the protection of the child from excessive cold, heat, rain and wind – earth, fire, water and air. In this way, the particular is connected with the general. As for Vitruvius; before architecture ever has a form, and an aesthetic, it has an action, and a morality. This active and moral character is central to Alberti’s notion of architecture too. Like the mother, it gives shelter and preserves the means of sustenance. In its rude beginnings, architecture mothers the weak, an otherwise endangered species.
Next, by coming into society, we confess, and remedy through the assistance of others, our deficiencies. He wrote,in De familia:
…nature planned that where I might be weak, you would make good the deficiency, and in some way you would lack the virtue found in another. Why this? So that I should have need of you, and you of him, he of another, and some other of me. In this way one man’s need for another serves as the cause and means to keep us all united in general friendship and alliance. This may, indeed, have been the source and beginning of republics. Laws may have begun thus rather than as I was saying before; fire and water alone may not have been the cause of so great a union among men as society gives them. Society is a union sustained by laws, by reason, and by custom.[5]
Again, in De Familia, he wrote, ‘E quella antica notissima oppinion di que’ filosofi, quali affermano l’amicizia solo essere nata per sovenire l’uno all’altro ne’ nostri quasi assidui d’ora in ora varii bisogni e necessità…’[6] In De iciarchia, he explained that republics themselves grew out of reciprocity of support.[7]
The basic argument of the first passage in De familia is reiterated in the prologue to De re aedificatoria. Among the services done by the architect was ‘his providing us with safe and pleasant places, where we may shelter ourselves from the heat of the sun, from cold and tempest…’ [8] The first function is protective. The action of the architect corresponds with that of the paterfamilias in the Intercenale ‘Servus’: ‘He alone is reponsible for all of his household, and must see that none of them goes hungry or suffers from heat or cold.[9] The role of the mother in seeing to it that the extremes of heat and cold do not discomfort the social human being is not stated explicitly, but the symmetry of the arguments above in De familia and De re aedificatoria means that the maternal principle must be present in Alberti’s conception of the aboriginal stage of architecture in De re aedificatoria. Care and devotion are indispensible to successful mothering. They must be the moral principles of architecture too.
Weakness and deficiency are our constant condition; but their effects are mitigated under the principles of motherhood and society [republics]. The child has the protection and nurturing of the mother and, metaphorically, the aboriginal building. Building is, analogously, his refuge. The adult continues to be unable to sustain himself exclusively by his own efforts. A circle of exchange is set up. While he has need that another can supply, he has a surplus of some other thing with which he can assist someone else. The individual exchanges are not reciprocal, but the totality of them sees each individual receiving and giving a service. Society is the total sum of these acts and can be thought of as the representation of reciprocity as a universal. So, architecture and society have distinct origins but they also share a single principle, human insufficiency.
Throughout Alberti’s writings, there appear indications of his moral conception of architecture. The present discussion of the central plan and of the value of candour which, it is suggested, it embodies, attempts to bring them together. An alertness to the moral action that architecture intends to take makes us see gestures in Alberti’s own architecture. The benches that are made part of the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai are not unique. But their presence is morally unambiguous; those in need of rest may sit in the shade and let the world become to them a passing spectacle. It is the gift of the building and of its builder.[10] When we focus upon the courtesy of the provision, we see that it is repeated in the city courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale at Urbino. The palazzo retreats from the line of the street to create a recess and haven from the heat of the sun: there is shade to seek. And benches are again provided. Given the preeminence of the despot within Urbino, the benevolence of the gesture is surprising; but it no doubt reassured and gratified. Clearly, nothing so eager as an attribution is being offered here. Such provisions as these are everwhere to be found. But, if there is such a thing as a zeitgeist, there is something as sure in this piazzetta – a sittlichkeitsgeist; a moral spirit abroad. Alberti turns to the private house’s public service at the beginning of Chapter 2, Book V of De re aedificatoria: ‘Porticum quidem et vestibulum non servorum magis, uti Diodorus putat, quam universorum civium gratia positum arbitramur.’[11] Vasari was very critical of the Loggia Rucellai[12], and, in the debate between form and morality, we might be tempted to defend Alberti by withdrawing the attribution to him of its solecisms. At the same time, though, its moral posture is clear to read, and it in no way contradicts Alberti’s position. The building speaks of visibility and candour, of social encounter in denial of conspiracy or double-dealing. If Alberti did design it, it was incoherent in all’antica terms, but it was unambiguous in its openness. The epithets that he uses to describe his preliminary design for Sant’Andrea in Mantua in his letter to Lodovico Gonzaga, probably of 1470, promise a morally satisfactory structure. [13] It would be more ampio, lieto, degno and eterno. Structural frailty might compromise its durability and architectural-grammatical errors its nobility, but the Rucellai Loggia was abundantly ampio and lieto.
Space, light, structure and mass –the essentials of Sant’ Andrea, the building conceived materialistically – are here transformed into what are ambiguously aesthetic and moral qualities. The occupants will enjoy the building’s luminous spaciousness, stability and grandeur. It would substitute for a building (the one proposed by ‘Manetti’) that, relatively speaking, would be cramped, gloomy, mean and frail. Though the words here are tendentious, the idea of senescence is suggestive. Alberti says in his prologue to Della pittura that he was of the view that Mother Nature herself was post-menopausal, until he came to Florence and saw the dome of Florence Cathedral. The spirit of a fruitful young woman replaced that of a sterile old one. When he had Agnolo Pandolfini describe the cathedral in Profugiorum ab aerumna, the delights of spring were evoked and the Madonna who spiritually inhabited it combined grace and stability.[14] Sant’Andrea would also combine these qualities; being lieto and ampio, it had the one and –degno and eterno– the other. In Book VII,3 of De re aedificatoria, Alberti also requires that the temple possess these apparently contradictory qualities: ‘an gratiamne magis decoremque an ad aeternitatis perpetuitem…’[15] It should be impossible to say whether the temple is more graceful and well-appointed or built to withstand the ravages of time. Is its venustas or its firmitas more to be applauded? Alberti seems to be insisting that aesthetic value does not attach only to the obviously attractive, but also to the necessary. If grace is a spectacle of moral worth, stability is the substance of it. The mother who saw to the shelter for her offspring had their safety first in mind; her structure was a sound one.
However, Alberti’s belief in the moral priority of virtù – the masculine quality as its etymology indicates – made him cast the architect as a heroic pioneer; no stay-at home. While the mother tended to the needs of the children, the father was abroad, living the danger of the hunt.
“But the only obligation to the architect is not for his providing us with safe and pleasant places, where we may shelter ourselves from the heat of the sun, from cold and tempest, (though this is no small benefit; but for having besides contrived many other things, both of a private and publick nature of the highest use and convenience to the life of man.”[16] It was the female part to moderate extremes of temperature. Now, in the prologue to De re aedificatoria, Alberti goes on to list the heroic acts performed by the architect who preserves nobility through hard times and is, as-it-were, its historian or chronicler in making its monument. He preserves the body’s health by supplying baths, gymnasia and the like. It is he who designs the mechanical devices that industry, transportation and time-keeping require. The honouring of men and gods falls to the architect and, through him, the connection remains unbroken through the ages. The communications that he establishes enable intercourse, exchange and the spread of civilisation itself. At last, the architect is the supreme man of action, the soldier. As military engineer, he wins more battles than the warrior.
There is perhaps a hint of intellectual embarrassment here, for Alberti undoubtedly feels the strength of the feminine principle in originating architecture. It is in a spirit of doing duty to an idea of the intrinsic nobility of the active life that he demands that a masculine principle take over from the feminine, and, perhaps, make architecture out of mere building. He will certainly insist that architecture is a reflective art; it must have theory and practice, just as Vitruvius said. Having listed the heroic acts of the architect, Alberti goes on to establish his intellectual or contemplative credentials. The art is rooted in the mind of man: ‘…quam penitus insideat animis aedificandi cura et ratio…’[17] Its virtù will depend upon its possession of a theory. His academic philosophy is perhaps insecure here; but he has kept faith with his a priori position. It has dictated to him all along that the active and the virile give birth to the world in the more important sense. His principles are also bound to suffer a certain failure of confidence, for the empirical evidence is all around that birth-giving and nourishment belong, first, to the mother, and the world’s need of them is too obvious to need statement.[18] To defer to empirical evidence is to dethrone principle and speculative philosophy; at the same time it must raise a spirit of rebellion, for who would submit willingly to emasculation? Alberti’s commitment to virility – to the imitation of the ancient Roman perhaps – was a thing of mind. In life on the other hand, sensibility – a morality based in affection – could not deny the feminine principle.
The feminine principle expresses itself most clearly in the villa. In fact, the villa, understood as the building and the soil upon which it stands, itself becomes anthropomorphised as a female spirit. Lionardo Alberti, in De familia, praises the villa:
What kind of person could fail to take pleasure in his farm [villa]? The farm is of great, honorable, and reliable value. Any other occupation is fraught with a thousand risks, carries with it a mass of suspicions and of trouble, and brings numerous losses and regrets. […] The farm alone seems reliable, generous, trustworthy and truthful. Managed with diligence and love, it never wearies of repaying you. Reward follows reward. In spring the farm gives you a multitude of delights; greenery, flowers, aromas, songs. It tries to please you, it smiles and promises you a magnificent harvest, it fills you with good hopes as well as sufficient joy in the present. Then in summer how courteously it attends on you! First one sort of fruit, then another, comes to your house – your house is never empty of some gift. Then there is autumn: now the farm gives liberal reward for your labors, shows great gratitude for your merit – gladly, copiously, and faithfully serves you! Twelvefold reward is yours – for a little sweat, many casks of wine.[19]
Here, Alberti gathers together agriculture and moral values and represents them allegorically as woman bringing nourishment. The villa is the building that combines shelter and storage, the fusion of the aboriginal mother’s dual purposes. Alberti’s readiness to fuse or elide categories makes a moral reading of a material form always available to him. Indeed, it is possible to maintain that nothing was without a moral complexion. In this way, the villa appears perfectly disguised in a passage in Della pittura (1436): “I should like to see those three sisters to whom Hesiod gave the names of Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia, who were painted laughing and taking each other by the hand… This symbolises liberality, since one of the sisters gives, another receives and a third gives back again.”[20] The Graces’s actions encapsulate natural economy, the beginning of friendship, alliance and civil society, on the smallest scale. Alberti explains the natural system working in a more numerous population in De Familia:
‘…nature planned that where I might be weak, you would make good the deficiency, and in some way you would lack the virtue found in another. Why this? So that I should have need of you, and you of him, he of another, and some other of me. In this way one man’s need for another serves as the cause and means to keep us all united in general friendship and alliance. This may, indeed, have been the source and beginning of republics. Laws may have begun thus rather than as I was saying before; fire and water alone may not have been the cause of so great a union among men as society gives them. Society is a union sustained by laws, by reason, and by custom.’[21]
In Della pittura and De familia, Alberti is describing a round. In a context of benignity, the first giver receives back a bounty. The economy of simple reciprocity could not generate this excess production. Giving to one, but receiving from another is the essence of social economy. Eventually, money would allow us to discontinue the search for those whose needs and surpluses were the inverse of our own; but in the meantime, breaking the rigid bonds of reciprocity, was first kinship and then altruism – a confidence in the good sense of giving. It was the liberality of the villa that delighted Lionardo Alberti, above. Work is given to the soil which repays it abundantly. This economic relation so favourable to humankind impressed Agnolo Pandolfini in Profugiorum ab aerumna:
They say that there is no more faithful benefactor than the soil. What you may require of it, it supplies, according to Hesiod not in equal measure but in greater. Moreover you will find repayment of your own industry and vigilance, especially when committed to honest and worthy matters, when the weather and every factor conspire to reward your merits. Virtue never goes without her prize of praise and loveliness.[22]
The villa is the realisation of architecture’s necessary first role and of its moral performance in sheltering and sustaining. The whole farm generates surplus.
Insofar as the architect, as Alberti says in the Prologue to De re aedificatoria, mitigates the elemental extremes, he enacts the maternal principle, and the villa can be said to represent it to an exemplary degree. But, the architect, as he explains, does more. Acknowledgement of human weakness had seen the beginnings of two forms of refuge, building and society. As the sum of reciprocity, society achieves more than the survival of the individual; it makes possible the provision of conveniences to the many. Where the architect’s role is conceived as being in relation to society, a masculine principle is reasserted. The villa, at last, reveals itself to be society in microcosm for, as it is presided over by the Graces in their exemplification of liberality, that circle of receiving and giving assistance – the definition of society in the Prologue – is repeated. The masculine and feminine principles are married in the villa.
Yet how perverse –how contrarian the villa is!
Things should be quite different. To be civilized, I should go to the city. The etymology itself makes the argument. To be intelligent, I should go to where bumpkins don’t abound, where the critical mass of humanity is sufficient for intellectual intercourse to happen, where the university calls in the learned and curious. Barbarians hate the city, and I seek to avoid encounters with them.
Yet I go to my villa to escape barbarousness. I’ll be civilized on my farm. Conversation will be intelligent in the shade of the loggia. I shall cultivate my intellect: my social intercourse will be convivial.
This is a strange game of contradiction and state of topsy-turvydom.
Evidently, I’ve decided to question the city. I’ve come to despise it (or to pretend to do so). At least, I’m ambivalent about it; or I’ve adopted a schizophrenic attitude with regard to it. It might seem like a Dadaist or punk move: good is bad. Let’s wantonly despise our over-solicitous guardian, our doting and needy parent. But the city was not like this. Our attitude arose otherwise.
The city itself was schizophrenic. At the same time, it was willed and governed, and perilous and irrational. Reason and constitution existed alongside criminality and folly. In the city, there is a double experience. It is at war with itself –at the same time, political and anarchic. Or perhaps we should say, political and economic.
If we’d escape the civil war –and when we recognise it for what it is, escape is absolutely necessary– we’d put distance between these contradictory states. Specifically, we’ll eradicate what is inconsistent with the city in its definition; the place of regulated intercourse.
But if we address the problem as an existential one, we’ll adopt and acquiesce in tyrannical forms of action. Those who presume to create heaven on earth must dispense tough love. There’s no limit to their inhumanity.
The alternative is to put physical or geographical distance between the contradictory states. Villeggiatura solves the problem in this way. It caricatures the city as a wild and corrupt place, as the journey is thence and towards the villa, and, on the return journey, it raises hopes for the city to have realised its definition of order.
But the schizophrenic character of the city that is being noted here is perhaps a misdiagnosis. Or it may be that we are distorting our understanding by making it a predicate of the idea of the City itself. Maybe we need another word. If we look more closely at what opposes the city, we see that it is an inability of its inhabitants to recognise their interests as lying in the well-being of their fellows. There is an unreflectiveness, a failure of ambition for the polis, a self-seeking. These are attitudes belonging not to the city, properly understood, but to the place of getting-and-spending –the town.
It is the presence of the town, cuckoo-like within the city, that makes for this double-headed creature. The purposes of the one are at odds with the values of the other. Negotium prevails in town but, as the Ideal City View, at Urbino, and its many similar representations show, not in the city, for these are places of unfrettful existence.
Alberti observed this state of conflict, though he perhaps did not understand it in the terms that are being applied here. The villa that he described was characterised powerfully in two respects, one economic and the other, for want of a better word, aesthetic. The villa opposed the town –getting-and-spending– in the equity and honesty of the relation of labour and reward over which it presided. For example, Lionardo, in De familia, says, ‘The villa alone above all things is to be found wise, gracious, faithful, true. If you tend it with diligence and love, she will seem never to have satisfied you; she forever adds reward upon reward.’[23] Agriculture was without fraudulence. In Villa, he writes, ‘Nothing brings more honest wealth than agriculture. And the riches that one accumulates without fraudulence are a divine blessing.’[24] By antithesis, fraud infests the town. He writes, in De familia:
‘To be added is that you are able to retreat to your villa and live in peace … without hearing murmurings or quarrels or any other of those furies which, among the citizens of the town, never sleep – suspicions, fears, slanders, wrongs… you are able to escape from these dreadful shriekings, these tumults, this tempest of the town, the piazza and the palace.’[25]
The villa opposed also the city. In the city, the eye is attuned to abstraction, specifically to geometry and arithmetic. Symmetry and repetition of architectural elements are especially satisfactory in the city. They chime with the other abstractions that construct it –constitution, common purpose, monoglotism, common memory, and so on. The chaos of heterodoxy is anathema to the city. Alberti’s villa was the place emphatically of the delights of nature. There, rejoicing in birdsong, breezes, the aromas and colours of flowers, the abstract was rejected. He writes, for example, in Della familia: ‘Moreover, at your villa, you can enjoy these days, airy and pure, open and most joyful; you have before you a charming prospect and you can gaze out upon these verdant hills and those fruitful fields, and these clear springs and streams which chase one another, leaping and disappearing among the waving grasses.’[26] The plenitude of nature stands in opposition to the economy of intellect; its monument, the city.
Laetus in presens –Ficino’s motto at Careggi, adopted from Horace’s Ode II, XVI– was, equally, Alberti’s. If the wise man has memory and foresight, his brief life at the villa is a blessed and pacific barbarism. The otium that they sought –freedom for the mind for loftier thought– differed from that of the city, in being Parnassian rather than Olympian in ambition, but was the same in that the clamour of the town was kept at bay, by physical distance in the case of the villa and, in the case of the city, by good government.
[1] Grayson, II, De iciarchia. p.266, lines 29-32
[2] Renée Watkins, p.111: ‘Diventa la familia populosa non altro modo che si diventassono popolose terre, province e tutto el mondo, come ciascuno da sè stessi puo immaginando conoscere che la moltitudine de’ mortali da pochi a questo quasi infinito numero crebbe procreando e allevando figliuoli. E al procreare figliuoli niuno dubito all’uomo fu la donna necessaria. Poiche il figliuolo venne in luce tenero e debole, a lui era necessario avere a cui con diligenza e amore lo nutrisse e dalle cose nocive lo difendesse. Era loro nocivo el troppo freddo, e troppo sole, la molta piova, e i furiosi impeti de’venti; pero in prima trovorono il tetto sotto el quale nutrissino e difendissino se stessi e il nato. Qui adunque la donna sotto ombra rimaneva infaccendata a nutrire e mantenere il figliuolo. E perche essa occupata a custodire e governare lo erede, era non bene atta a cercare quello bisognava circa al suo proprio vivere e circa mantenere i suoi, pero l’uomo di natura più faticoso e industrioso usciva a trovare e portare secondo che a lui pareva necessario. Cosí alcuna volta si soprastava l’uomo, non tornando presto quanto era da’ suoi espettato. Per questo quando egli aveva portato, la donna tutto serbava, accio che ne’ seguenti giorni, soprastando il marito, né a sé né a suoi cosa mancasse.’(Romano, tenenti, Furlan, p.128-9, l.801-823)
[3] Watkins, p.207: ‘…quasi come la natura cosi provedesse al vivere nostro, volendo che l’uomo rechi a casa, la donna lo serbi.’ Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p267, l.2190
[4] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.268ff,
[5] Watkins, p.137: ‘Anzi volse che in quello in quale io manco, ivi tu supplisca, e in altra cosa manchi la quale sia appresso quell’altro. Perche questo? Perch’io abbia di te bisogno, tu di colui, colui d‘uno altro, e qualche uno di me, e cosi questo aver bisogno l’uno uomo dell’altro sia cagione e vinculo a conservarci insieme con publica amicizia e congiunzione. E forse questa necessita fu essordio e principio di fermare le republiche, di costituirvi le legge molto piu come diceva… fuoco o d’acque essere stato cagione di tanta fra gli uomini e si con legge, ragione e costumi colligata unione de’ mortali.’(Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.166, l.1886-95)
[6] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.391, l.1845-48
[7] See above, Impiety 2, note 2
[8] Orlandi, L’Architettura, Prologue: ‘Sed ne architecto ea re solum debemus, quod tuta optataque diffugia contra solis ardores brumam pruinasque dederit…’ (p.9)
[9] Marsh, p.95
[10] Giovanni Rucellai was alert to this sort of courtesy also at his country estate at Quaracchi. There was, “A grove of trees [albereto] near the house … from which one receives great consolation, not so much we in the house and in the village, as visitors and passers-by in very hot weather, because on one side it borders the road to Pistoia, so that no visitor passes by without stopping for a quarter of an our to see our garden.” Amanda Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century: an architectural and social history, CUP, 2005, p.46, quoting from Il Zibaldone, I, p.21.
[11] Orlandi, L’Archiettura, V, 2, p.339.
[13]See above, The Candid Place, note 30
[14] See, James Lawson, Word & Image
[15] Orlandi, L’Archiettura, VII, 3, p.54
[16] Op.cit., continuing the passage in note 4 above; p.9, “…-tametsi ipsum id haudquaquam minimum beneficium est-, quam quod multa invenerit privatim et publice procul dubio longe utilia et ad vitae usum iterum atques iterum accommodatissima.”
[17] Ibid., Prologue, p.11
[18] It is worth remarking that Filarete took up the idea of architecture as a sort of obstetric performance…
[19] Watkins, p.191: ‘Quale uomo fusse, il quale nin si traesse pacere della villa? Porge la villa utile grandissimo, onestissimo e certissimo. E pruovasi qualunque altro essercizio intopparsi in mille pericoli, hanno seco mille sospetti, seguongli molti danni e molti pentmenti […] La villa sola sopra tutti si truova conoscente, graziosa, fidata, veridica. Se tu la governi con diligenza e con amore, mai a lei parera averti satisfatto; sempre agiungne premio a’ premii. Alla primavera la villa ti dona infiniti sollazzi , verzure, fiori, odori, canti; sforzasi in piu modi farti lieto, tutta ti ride e ti promette grandissima ricolta, émpieti di buona speranza e di piaceri assai. Poi e quanto la truovi tu teco alla state cortese! Ella ti manda a casa ora uno, or un altro frutto, mai ti lascia la casa vota di qualche sua liberalita. Eccoti poi presso l’autunno. Qui rende la villa alle tue fatiche e a’ tuoi meriti smisurato premio e copiosissime merce, e quanto volentieri e quanto abundante, e con quanta fede! Per uno dodici, per uno piccole sudore piu e piu botte di vino.’(Romano, Tenenti Furlan, p.244-45. l.1506-1510, 1514-1527)
[21] Watkins, p.137
[22] Grayson, II, Profugiorum ab aerumna, p.157, l.4-9: ‘Dicono che nulla si truova fidissimo renditore quanto la terra. Ella ciò che tu gli accomandasti rende, secondo el precetto di Esiodo, non a pari ma a maggior misura. Ancora più troverai fedele la industria e viglianza tua, presertim quella quale tu porrai a cose oneste e degne, quando in queste e’ cieli e ogni fato si adopera in satisfare a’ tuoi meriti. Mai fu la virtù senza premio di lode e grazia.’
[23] ‘La villa sola sopra tutti si truova conoscente, graziosa, fidata, veridica. Se tu la governi con diligenza e con amore, mai a lei parerà averti satisfatto; sempre agiunge premio a’ premii.[Furlan, p.244]
[24] ‘Nulla piu iusto a ricchire che la agricoltura. E quelle richezze quali s’acumulano senza fraude sono uno bene divino.’ (Grayson, Vol.I, p.36)
[25] ‘Agiugni qui che tu puoi ridurti in villa e viverti in riposo … senza sentire romori, o relazione, o alcuna altra di quelle furie quali dentro alla terra fra’ cittadini mai restano, – sospetti, paure, maledicenti, ingiustizie … puoi fuggire questi strepiti, questi tumulti, questa tempesta della terra, della piazza, del palagio.’ (Furlan, p.247)
[26] ‘E anche vi godete in villa quelli giorni aerosi e puri, aperti e lietissimi; avete leggiardrissimo spettacolo rimirando que’ colletti fronditi, e que’ piani verzosi, e quelli fonti e rivoli chiari, che seguono saltellando e perdendosi fra quelle chiome dell’erba.’ (Furlan, p.246-47)
Alberti etc. 
Leave a comment