Alberti can be thought of as having a shadow presence in buildings for which he was not directly responsible. He was on occasion advisor, inspiration or philosophical scene-setter. At the same time, there was a building, for which he had no responsibility, but that he, so-to-speak, haunted, and that held a crucially important place in his thought and imagination. It figures several times in Alberti’s writings. He encountered it repeatedly, and he adopted a number of distinct perspectives upon it. These extended beyond the material, technical, formal and practical, to the spiritual. Florence Cathedral provoked moral and imaginative ruminations. He has left three or perhaps four documents that allow a reconstruction of something of his rich and complex response to the building. There are also some other documents behind which seem to hover recollections of the building. As well as an emblematic building for Alberti, Florence Cathedral can serve as a case study, for the kinds of thought that it prompted reveal the richness of his approach to architecture in general.
Of course, it should be remembered that what Alberti looked at in the mid 1430s demanded a prominent place in the mind of any witness. Its claim was self-evidently to be the greatest building in the world: loftier than Hagia Sophia, its dome of a greater span than the Pantheon’s. The cupola set at such a giddy height, it could have prompted the statement made a century later about the ambition of the New St Peter’s project –that the Pantheon would be built atop the Basilica of Maxentius.[1]
The first text to be considered focuses upon the building as a technical and practical exercise The dome of the Cathedral features in De reaedificatoria. Or rather, the present suggestion that it does so is predicated upon a particular reading of the treatise where, in Book III, Chapter 14, Alberti discusses domes.
Early in his treatment of the subject, he inserts a joke. Domes can be celestial or speluncular. They can be heavenly or infernal evocations: ‘Neque me praeterit Ennium poetam maximas coeli appellasse formices, et Servium cavernas dixisse eas esse…’.[2] Perhaps there is to be a wry smile at the thought that they are also devilishly difficult to describe; for he warns the reader that the terminology needs to be simplified and that he will be coining terms: ‘Fingenda mihi erunt nomina, quo sim, quem esse me his libris maxime elaborandum institui, facilis et minime obscurus.’[3] First, he explains that there are three basic types of dome: fornix, camura and recta spherica. The Cathedral’s dome is not one of these types. Orlandi-Portoghesi translates the terms as, a botte, a crociera and sferiche.[4] The expressions are well-chosen, for Alberti defines them very effectively in terms predominantly of mathematical locus: the first is a curved beam produced along a straight line, the second –groin vault– is the intersection at right angles of two barrel vaults, and the third is, in effect, the revolution of an arch about an axis passing vertically through its apex.
Alberti then goes on to mutations of these pure forms. The question to be debated is whether the Cathedral dome is one of those. He describes first the semi-dome, produced by slicing a spherical dome vertically through its apex. It can buttress or extend spaces. Continuing the slicing procedure, there is then the sail dome (turgidi veli similitudine velam). It is a spherical vault (recta spherica) with four vertical slices removed. This is otherwise identified as the dome on merging pendentives. It can be pictured in the loggia of Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital and the side aisle bays of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. Alberti is repeating the action that produced the semi-dome, except that the cuts are shifted away from the axis.
At this point, Alberti goes on to describe the sphericam angularem. It results from repeating the action that produced the sail dome for a six-sided or eight-sided figure: ‘In qua vero perficiunda plures fornicis partes conveniant, quales videmus sex octove angulorum areas testudinari, hanc nos sphericam angularem appellabimus.’[5] Orlandi-Portoghesi construes the description as that of a dome like the Old Sacristy’s.[6] The more sides to the polygon, the shorter the spans of the arches running round the circumference and the greater the difference in height between their apices and that of the whole vault. Alberti describes the vault as consisting of fornices. Groins of a prominence proportional to the number of sides of the polygon run across the vault from the springings of these arches. Brunelleschi made twelve vertical slices in his domes of the Old Sacristy and the Pazzi Chapel. If described in terms of locus, this dome would be the product of the intersection of six or eight curved beams produced over an arc.
However, despite the geometric consequence of the procedure of setting the recta spherica on a figure of more than four sides, it is not entirely certain that Alberti is conceiving the pumpkin home here. There are two difficulties with the interpretation. One is that it depends upon a somewhat cavalier reading of the word fornix – barrel vault. It is a difficult passage. To repeat: ‘In qua vero perficiunda plures fornicis partes conveniant, quales videmus sex octove angulorum areas testudinari, hanc nos sphericam angularem appellabimus.’ Another way of describing a pumpkin dome could be as a circuit of arches produced across an arc and diminishing in width to nothing at the apogee. Though the liths (as of an orange) conceived in this way have something in common with them, they are not really barrel vaults. Perhaps a passage of text has been removed here. The qua, now refers grammatically to the ‘testudinem … quam nos turgidi veli similitudine velam nuncupabimus.’ But the structure as described consists of barrel vaults conjoining in some way, not the sail vault. Of course, it is possible, as well as that a passage is missing here, that Alberti was not clear in thinking or expression.
Having next explained that vault-building requires centerings, Alberti observes that neverthless the recta spherica can be built without centering. The vault can be stable through the process of construction because each voussoir serves also as a keystone, or locking element. A voussoir in the vertical plane is simultaneously a keystone in the horizontal plane.[7] The principle can be understood by looking at Giuliano da Sangallo’s drawing.[fig.] The ‘volte tonde di mezzane quali si voltano a Firenze senza armadura’ includes Alberti’s principle in the spiralling herringbone brickwork; for each brick placed as a header acts as a keystone, together with stretches of masonry forming webs, between the spiralling ribs, in which the bricks act as simple voussoirs. However, Alberti goes on to say that it is possible to build also the angularem sphericam without centering: ‘Angularem quoque testudinem sphericam, modo per eius istius crassitudinem rectam sphericam interstruas, poteris attollere nullis armamentis.’[8] This is the second difficulty. Now, whilst it is conceivable that the dome on merging pendentives can be built without centering, the pumpkin or rib-and-sails vault cannot, for the ribs or groins in this form of vault are given an extra burden, in the form of the sails springing from them.
There is also another way of conceiving an intersection of barrel vaults (‘plures fornicis partes conveniant’). Since the dome of Florence Cathedral is not of the pumpkin type, it could best be described as a mutation of the groin vault. A pointed arch, produced, would be a pointed tunnel vault. The intersection of two at right angles creates a pointed groin vault. If a further two pointed tunnel vaults were to pass through on the diagonals, further groins would be created. While the vaults (as opposed to the groins) are borne in mind, the picture, at this point, is of something resembling the dome with ribs and sails. The difference is that the groins are rising to the level of the ridge of the tunnel vaults, whereas in the vault that Orlandi-Portoghesi conceives, these ridges are forming arches. However, another way of thinking is to abstract the geometry of the groins, and make it the geometric formwork of a dome, stretching infilling material across it. In effect, the groins are turned inside out, and become the edges of curved planes of the vault. Each of its surfaces, as with the groin vault, curves in only one plane. They are straight-lined in the other plane. The term sphericam angularem would serve well to describe this sort of dome. Such a dome can be built without centering. The proof is the dome of Florence Cathedral, famously built without centering.
How many examples of this dome type constructed in this way can Alberti have seen? As well as an object, the dome of Florence Cathedral was an achievement. The appearance of the type in De re aedificatoria was, surely, the revelation, in practice, of a single exemplary case. The difficulties that had stood in the way of its realisation had been immense. Alberti, in recognition of them, noted, in his Prologue to Della pittura, that the impossible seemed to have been undone in Brunelleschi’s solution: ‘..quale arteficio [the dome] certo, se io ben iudico, come a questi tempi era incredibile potersi, così forse appresso gli antichi fu non saputo né conosciuto?’[9]
There had been a drum raised in obedience to the rule established by those who had first conceived the dome: it guaranteed that the dome constructed according to the system of the ‘pointed fifth’ would reach a height two times its span. The increase of the span from 62 braccia to 72 in the middle of the 1360s meant a corresponding increase in the height of the vault. However, that increase could not take up the whole 20 braccia. The drum filled out the difference. Rising well above the levels of the nave and of the tribunes, it was unbuttressed. Adding to the difficulties was the octagonal plan of the structure. A long span passed from the points of the figure and a short from side to side. In elevation, the loads received at the wall-head were similarly inconstant. On the long diagonal the material of the vault would exert a greater lateral thrust than on the short, and the shere mass of material was greater on the long spans than the short. There was an absolute need to deal with thrusts that, upon the octagon at the level of the springing, were impossible to compute. The solution could not involve the buttressing of the drum. Brunelleschi’s solution also solved the other main problem of the project: the impossibility of creating a timber centering (because of the size of such a structure and the cost of the timber itself). By means of tie rings and compression rings, thrusts could be neutralised and the dome, thoughout the process of construction, converted to dead weight, bearing only vertically. By these means too, the structure could rise without centering. As Alberti wrote, ‘Chi mai si duro o si invido non lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo qui struttura si grande, erta sopre e’ cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti e’ popoli toscani, fatta sanza alcuno aiuto di travamenti o di copia di legname…’[10] It was a testitudo angularis in being able to rise in this way. The most famous local example of such a dome was over the Baptistry.
The achievement was also more than technical, for Alberti considered the methodological resources out of which Brunelleschi fashioned it. Whereas the ancient Roman dome builders belonged within an artisan or theoretical tradition that was able to address such problems (as, Alberti no doubt thought, the Pantheon exemplified), Brunelleschi could call upon no such parentage, for the thread had been broken by a Dark Age.[11] He invented the solution out of his own resources. Artisan tradition, in 1420, had been unable to solve the problem of the dome. Instead, an individual is credited with having done so. The individual had done what neither contemporaries nor the ancient Romans could do. The achievement was historic.
The dome of Florence Cathedral stood, for Alberti, as a moment, attesting something about individual human creativity. It is possible to say that Man is redefined in the prologue to Della pittura. And it is more than a rhetorical trope; Alberti is not making the claim merely artfully.
The Prologue’s praise of Brunelleschi and of the other most distinguished artists of the immediately preceding period -Donatello, Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia and Masaccio- is set within an argument of huge compass. Alberti had it that their achievements gave the lie to a belief that he had had, namely that Nature –and history– was menopausal. Her fecund life –he had thought– was over: ‘…la natura, maestra delle cose, fatta antica e stracca, più non producea come né giuganti così né ingegni, quali in que’ suoi quasi giovanili e più gloriosi tempi produsse, amplissimi e maravigliosi.’[12] The world had only infertility and senescence as its future. But he was wrong. The evidence of the state of the visual arts in Florence was that she was indeed even in the flower of her young adulthood. The dome, as a challenge and an achievement, was a sign of life; and the life that it announced was an example for all to take. The church was inhabited by a fecund spirit, at some level to be identified with its dedicatee, Santa Maria del Fiore.
The topos that shaped the Prologue to Della pittura is a rich one, for it contains within itself the whole notion of rebirth, or renaissance. Nature had been fecund; she then passed into an infertile condition; and now she was productive again. It was a rebirth of fertility itself that Alberti charted. In addition, it was germinated in the will of the artists themselves: ‘…nostra industria e diligenza.’[13]
It is tempting to suggest that, as he worked on the translation of his Latin treatise on painting into Italian (an order of events, confessedly, to be argued) a drama that he had only just witnessed inspired him to think in the metaphorical terms of a regained fecundity. The notion is encouraged by an oddness in the prologue to Della pittura. The subject of the treatise does not prima facie connect with an achievement in architecture. Yet the dome very much belongs in the prologue itself, where the theme is the general efflorescence of the visual arts in Florence. The event was one that took place in Spring of that year and focussed ideas of the new season, the historic feat and the presiding spirit of the now-pregnant Virgin Mary. There is reason to think that, for Alberti, the dome was an emblem.
On 25th March 1436, Pope Eugenius IV made his way from his lodgings at Santa Maria Novella to Santa Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral, to officiate at the service of consecration of the newly-completed dome. It was Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation. Brunelleschi had prepared a timber walkway raised two braccia – about four feet– above the ground for the pontiff’s passage from the one church to the other. The pope and his retinue must have levitated their way to their destination from the perspective of all but the first rank of onlookers. Brunelleschi’s achievement –completing the construction so quickly, for the pope had given short notice of his intentions– might have seemed to rival Julius Caesar’s in marching his timber bridge across the Rhine. The service, in the Cathedral, was the occasion of the singing by the choir of the motel in four parts, Nuper Rosarum Flores, specially composed by Guillaume Dufay. It told of the end of winter and the arrival of spring, of the Madonna, of the Flower. There, was the polyphonic experience. The season itself could not but enter the Cathedral.
Thoughts about the Cathedral in connection with spring –indeed, identification of the Cathedral with spring– recurred to Alberti as he was writing the dialogue, Profugiorum ab aerumna a few years later. Angolo Pandolfini is given the speech, that has been used above where Alberti’s Faith and Belief were the subject, in praise of Santa Maria del Fiore:
And certainly this temple has in itself grace and majesty; and, as I have often thought, I delight to see joined together here a charming slenderness with a robust and full solidity so that, on the one hand, each of its parts seems designed for pleasure, while, on the other, one understands that it has all been built for perpetuity. I would add that here is the constant home of temperateness, as of springtime: outside, wind, ice and frost; here inside one is protected from the wind, here mild air and quiet. Outside, the heat of summer and autumn; inside, coolness. And if, as they say, delight is felt when our senses perceive what, and how much, they require by nature, who could hesitate to call the temple the nest of delights? Here, wherever you look, you see the expression of happiness and gaiety; here it is always fragrant; and, that which I prize above all, here you listen to the voices during mass, during that which the ancients called the mysteries, with their marvelous beauty.[14]
The structure of the passage –indeed of the argument– is very revealing and eloquent. It opens with an assertion that seems absurd, for the church is credited with possessing antithetical qualities –grace and majesty.[15] Grace implies fluid movement, the lightest of treads. Majesty is static, weighty and impassive. How can the building have both? As will be seen, however, Alberti is neither sloppy nor rhetorically dishonest in proposing a resolution of opposites. He continues by elaborating the thought and by, as it were, creating two lists of antithetical epithets for the church. He finds, corresponding with grace, a charming slenderness, and a source of pleasure. At the same time, the majestic structure is robust and stable, and assures him of its durability. He would propose the same meeting of opposed qualities when he described the church of Sant’ Andrea that he would design for Lodovico Gonzaga at lieto and eterno.[16]
The cathedral, then, contains opposites. However, the building is not an architectural contradiction in terms. In fact, Alberti has it achieving what his contemporary, the mathematician, philosopher and cleric, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), sought; a meeting or reconciliation of opposites. Cusanus was fascinated and inspired by the thought of there being points where opposition –the principle of strife– was undone; where paradox or dichotomy were somehow resolved.[17] The quest for them might be in the realms of speculative philosophy, mathematics or moral affairs. [Get eg] Where they would be found –where strife would be overturned– the opposite principle, that of love, would be manifest.
In Alberti’s passage, it turns out that architecture can be a meeting of opposites. Having carefully elaborated the duality by listing the characteristics of the building under each heading, he presents the presiding and reconciling characteristic of the place. It is the ‘constant home of temperateness’. In Winter, the Cathedral is warm, and in Summer, cool. That is the nature of Spring; and the Cathedral is explicitly equated with the Spring, which within its walls and beneath its roof becomes perpetual. Spring itself is a meeting of opposites, right at the heart of Nature.
If the reader will go along with Alberti’s argument, the absurdity of his first assertion must fall away. Within temperateness –or the word for its aesthetic equivalent in architecture– there is no contradiction between grace and majesty. The task of architecture is precisely to represent that meeting or reconciliation of grace and majesty, slenderness and stability, pleasure and durée (the moment and eternity). Outside, the seasons may turn, but temperateness prevails within.
He continues the passage by conjuring the sensational aspects of Spring. The fragrancy is that of the flowers: delighting the ear is the song of the birds. There is perhaps here a recollection of the Song of Solomon, 2:
11 For, lo, the winter is past,/the rain is over and gone;/12 the flowers appear on the earth;/the time of the singing of birds is come,/and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;/13 the fig tree putteth forth her green figs,/and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
The incense and choral music of the church evoked both. Involving just such a bombardment of the senses of sight, smell and hearing –the sensations of the Spring– was that service of consecration of the dome on Lady Day, 1436.
When these sensory delights are gathered together, they can also be seen to characterise a certain kind of painting, and it is impossible to doubt that Alberti responded to its promptings. Just as the Cathedral was a synaesthetic trigger, so, perhaps a little surprisingly for our understanding of Alberti, was the painting of the International Gothic. The rationalist core of De pictura and the mention of Masaccio in the prologue to Della Pittura can make it seem that Alberti was partisan as a critic of painting, and favoured what could be called the ‘severe’ school of early fifteenth-century painting. The treatise is also a compendium of references to painting gleaned from ancient literature, to the extent that it can seem that Alberti had a classical revival exclusively in mind. However, this would be to take an unbalanced view. If painting addressed human reason, it also engaged the senses. That is the implication that can be taken from a passage in Book Two which repeatedly notes painting’s peculiar ability to appeal to the learned and the unlearned.[18] Conventional belief at the time was that the unlearned took pleasure in sensation rather than meaning. Where he discusses pleasure in variety and copiousness in painting, Alberti makes analogies with these qualities in music and cuisine.[19] He also enjoys them in colour.[20] A readiness to see, hear and savour in the same terms indicates that a sense is accompanied by similar imagined exercises of the other organs of sense. A particularly good example of a type of painting that speaks the same language of delight as the Cathedral is Gentile da Fabriano’s Madonna and Child with Saints Nicholas and Catherine, in the Staatlich Museen, Berlin.[fig] The Madonna’s throne is set up in the meadow in which the flowers bloom profusely and, without doubt, perfume the scene. It is ambiguously the song of birds and the music of angels that is to be heard, for orchestras of angels inhabit the two trees that gently divide the picture plane to echo the form of a triptych.
Spring is architecture’s metaphor or emblem in Alberti’s thinking. Agnolo’s passage may be read as an amplification upon a point made, more prosaically, in the prologue to De re aedificatoria. It is a key function of architecture that it moderates the elemental extremes. Alberti rejects the familiar arguments that water or fire –the oasis or the hearth– were the first causes of us coming together into society. He is probably thinking of the elements seasonally: in Winter, there is too much of the one and in Summer, too much of the latter. Spring and Autumn are the seasons analogous with the more comfortable condition that architecture provides. ‘Sed ne architecto ea re solum debemus, quod tuta optataque diffugia contra solis ardores brumam pruinasque dederit…’.[21] The action of all architecture in the theoretical text is shown in specifics in his account of the Cathedral. At the same time, the Cathedral becomes reciprocally an epitome. What emerges, when the two texts are put together, is a pointer to Alberti’s conception of architecture at a fundamental level. It operates at the level of poetical analogy, where philosophical dialectic is resolved and where the moral equates with the beautiful. All architecture aspires to the quality of Spring, the season when human beings are comfortable in the world, the one contrasting with those that, oddly, they cannot survive without artificial aids. Thermal mass, illumination and ventilation may be the practical means to achieve it prosaically. By climatological analogy, however, it becomes a poetic effect. Happiness itself is a springtime of the soul. The achievement of the dome –the occasion of the gathering of the voices– was, of course, the final exclusion of the elemental extremes. It had to be implicated in Spring itself by reason of its function and its moment. The church announces the undoing of the Fall itself, as do so many paintings of the Madonna and Child in an Edenic garden.
The Cathedral with the dome was an object, an achievement, an emblem, an epitome and an experience of a richness equating with that of Nature herself. It was also a theatre in which could be acted out Man’s truly virtuous human relations.
Alberti arranged for it to serve such a function, when he organised the Certame Coronario. It was a poetry competition that took place inside the church, more specifically, beneath the dome, on 22nd October 1441. The contestants were to compose lines on the subject of amicizia –that reconciliation of difference that, in human affairs, corresponded with the meeting of opposites that Cusanus had made the object of his quest. Alberti himself wrote a poem:
‘Dite, o mortali, che sì fulgente corona
poneste in mezo, che pur mirando volete?
Forse l’amicitia, qual col celeste Tonante
tra li celicoli è con maiestate locata,
ma pur sollicita non raro scende l’olimpo
sol se subsidio darci, se comodo possa,
non vien nota mai, non vien composta temendo
l’invidi contra lei scelerata gente nimica.
In tempo et luogo veggo che grato sarebbe
a chi qui mira manifesto poterla vedere,
s’oggi scendesse qui dentro accolta vedreste
sì la sua effigie et gesti, sì tutta la forma.
Dunque voi che qui venerate su’ alma corona
leggete i miei monimenti et presto saravvi
l’inclita forma sua molto notissima, donde
cauti amerete. Così sarete beati’.[22]
‘Tell us, O mortals, with this shining crown set in our midst, what for its praiseworthiness do you wish to possess? Perhaps Friendship, placed in majesty with the heavenly thunderer among his angels, though frequently invoked, comes down from Olympus readily if She has succour to bring us, if She can do so obligingly; [but] never makes herself known, never reveals herself fully, while in fear of the envy against her of wicked and hostile humankind. In time and space I see how welcome it would be to this admiring assembly to be able to see her, if today she should descend right here, received among us, both her image and her actions, indeed her complete form. So, you who venerate her spiritual crown, read my injunctions and soon her glorious form will be fully before you, wherefore you will love [?] in all proper measure. In this way you will be blessed.’ [23]
Alberti’s argument is that the reception of the gift of friendship is dependent upon our preparations –our rejection of envy and wickedness. The poem was surely recited with gestures made to the golden crown that was to be the victor’s prize and to the dome above –the image of heaven where Jupiter dwelt and the realm from which amicizia would descend, bringing harmony to the assembly and to the world. In other words, Alberti invited the audience or congregation to understand the theme by reference to the built fabric about them.
Amicizia was analogous with Spring and with the building that retains temperateness irrespective of the weather outside. In the preface to Book IV of De familia, Alberti describes the visit of Buto, an old family retainer. His gift of a few choice fruits provokes a discussion of friendship. Its characteristic is that it was constant, and unchanged by changing circumstances. Fortune might change; but friendship did not: ‘…essere dunque vero amico costui a chi qual sia commutazion di fortuna puo mai distorre o minuire la impresa benivolenza…’[24] Fortune is to human affairs what weather is to natural conditions. The idea of friendship as a kind of refuge from the inconstancy and assaults of the world is expressed by Adovardo: ‘Vidi quanto alletava darci a qualunque lodati e buoni, quasi come refuggio e porto, dove truovino fedel consiglio, pronta opera, presto aiuto, e in ogni loro cosa diligente cura, molto e assiduo officio.’[25] Conducting himself in this way, the good man has a model in certain of the saints and perhaps especially in the intercessory Madonna. The Cathedral, as described by Agnolo, has a sort of ghostly presence in this discussion.
The temple or basilica, and amicizia are compared in specific terms by Adovardo. An important similarity is the ability of both to exclude disharmonious elements:
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?[26]
Sun, rain and wind prevail only outside the church as do distrust and disaffection where people are not bound in friendship. Constancy and fellow-feeling sustain friendship. The temple, keeping out the elements, is itself capable of moral conduct and of cloistering those sentiments. It houses religious observance; it sets up barriers against profanity, and it expresses its functions. Adovardo’s speech would not have been out of place in the Cathedral on the occasion of the Certame Coronario. Indeed, the thought is one to pause over. The passage does read like an interpolation. It does not really continue the argument being developed at that point in the text, which was that benevolence and amicizia are not to be equated. What is missing from goodwill, he says, is reciprocity, the point to which he immediately returns after the short digression likening the church to amicizia. The attractive though unverifiable thought is that it was taken from Alberti’s speech on 22nd October 1441. In that case, the parallel between the necessary courtesies of friendship, and the ornaments whereby the church defined itself functionally and morally –products of the labours of Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello and Luca della Robbia– would make for fine theatre. And, recalling the prologue to Della pittura, it is a pity that Masaccio had not worked there. His work was to be seen at the other end of the raised walkway taken by the pope in that Lady Day: in Santa Maria Novella was the Trinity Fresco.
A recollection of the occasion –the vault, the artistic enrichment of the scene, the music and the season– perhaps informed in parts a passage composed to very different literary purpose in Momus. Mortals are preparing a great spectacle by which to placate the gods:
I shall pass over the innumerable crowd of musicians, stage performers and poets who flowed in from the provinces and all over the world. Whatever worthy things there were among the nations were brought together to beautify the temples, the sacrifices and the games. I won’t mention the rest, but I cannot pass over the vast project of swathing the top and sides of the theatre and the Circus Maximus in enormous gold-embroidered veils, an unbelievably massive job. In places of honor stood statues of the great gods, all shining with gold and jewels. But what surpassed the gold and gems in beauty, as much as they themselves were surpassed in value, were the flowers: the flowers strewn over the statues, adding to their charm; the flowers woven into garlands, girdling the statues and perfuming them with delicious incense. Paintings, too, alabaster tables and various miraculous mirrors were added, filling men not only with admiration, but also with dumfounded amazement.[27]
Perhaps Alberti enriches the remembered scene with the fantasy that his own perspective tricks, referred to in De Pictura, were on display.
A later passage in Adovardo’s speech in Book IV of De familia rises to a level of eloquence that is unusual for the text as a whole and makes use of language to which the audience to Alberti’s poem would be attuned:
E non dubitate che la virtù, cosa divina e santissima quale perpetuo sta illustre con molto lume e splendore di lode e fama in chi la sia certo adornerà quella ottima vostra amicizia, qual per sé nata e con constanza affermata, tra voi sarà poi eterna e molto iocundissima.[28]
To have lasting joy is to be blessed. Agnolo Pandolfini’s Cathedral is not unlike. It does seem possible that Alberti’s speech is to be reconstructed in part from Adovardo’s passage from lines 1470 [p.377] and 1608 [p.382] in the edition of Romano, Tenenti and Furlan. The point is made the stronger by the fact that, eventually, Adovardo returns to the theme of the simile of amicizia and the sacred building: ‘Sarà, dico adunque, amicizia quella grandissima, a quale tu piú nulla vi desideri; ché non si direbbe perfetta, se cose ivi necessarie potesse agiungerli.’[29] This state of completeness corresponds very neatly with the property whereby things of nature and architecture can suffer no modification without damage: ‘Nos tamen brevitatis gratia sic deffiniemus: ut sit pulchritudo quidem certa cum ratione concinnitas universarum partium in eo, cuius sint, ita aut addi aut diminui aut immutari possit nihil quin improbabilius reddatur.’[30]
Amicizia’s kinship with the Virgin and with Primavera in Alberti’s thinking is evident –the locus of this bonding, the church itself. Here, all is moralised. And it becomes clear, from the case of Florence Cathedral, that architecture for Alberti had a legible moral character and action. That is, Alberti’s thinking about architecture set its moral nature prominently, in a way that later and modern thinking has tended to overlook.
The audience at the Certame Coronario was invited to look up into the dome and acknowledge congregationally the arrival of amicizia. It was to be an embrace of good fellowship that they would receive. Now, this embrace was an act of a material kind. There was a masonry dome above the witnesses’ heads. Brunelleschi had built it. In the Prologue to Della pittura, Alberti had pointed to the architect’s embrace of the congregation. The dome was a ‘… struttura si grande, erta sopre e’ cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti e’ popoli toscani.’ Thanks to Brunelleschi’s act in gathering the people, like Moses or like the Madonna della Misericordia, amicizia could be manifest. Finally, architecture was a moral art. The Cathedral was its epitome. And the female principle of shelter and succour which had belonged to building since earliest time, as we saw above in The Candid Place 2, continued to preside there.
On the occasion of the Certame Coronario, Alberti observed a gathering of people bound in a temperament the very reverse of one he had conceived on an earlier occasion before or within Florence Cathedral. In the prologue to Della pittura he wrote, ‘Chi mai sì duro o sì invido non lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo qui struttura sì grande…?’ –‘Who could ever be so hard or envious that he could withhold praise…’ Uninspired by the dome, that person is hard, envious and silent. Temperamentally, he is melancholic, and envy is the melancholic’s vice. His season is winter, cold and dry. By contrast, the congregation attending the poetry contest and listening to Alberti’s poem look up in praise, not down in envy, and see the light, not darkness. They are not dry-cold, but hot-moist, not in a wintery mood but with the joy of spring. They gather sociably, unified in a sanguine temperament.
Alberti was at the service of 25.3.36. Description of attendant musicians: P. Weiss, Music in the Western World, NY, 1984. p.81
[1][1]Pantheon atop Basilica of Maxentius –[get
[2] Orlandi, L’Architettura, III, 14, p.241. Discussion here best concentrates upon the Latin.
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5]Op.cit., p.243
[6] Op.cit., p.242-43, note 1
[7] Op.cit., p.245-46: ‘Est tamen inter testudines una omnium recta spherica, quae armamenta non postulet, quando ea quidem non ex arcubus solum constat, verum etiam coronis. Et quis possit referre aut meditari animo, quam sint horum uterque innumerabiles herentes adacti sese mutuo intersecantes ad pares angulos et ad impares, ut quotocunque loco per universarum testidinem istiusmodi aliquem interserueris lapidem, plurimorum intelligas te et arcuum et coronarum cuneum apposuisse? Et coronam qui coronae superastruxerit, et in arcum qui alterum arcum perduxerit, fingito velle id opus labescere, unde incipiet? Cunctis praesertim cuneis unicum centrum petentibus pari et viribus et innixtu.’
[8] Op.cit., p.247
[9] Grayson, III, Della pittura, p.8
[10] Ibid.
[11] Op.cit., p.7: ‘Confessoti sì a quegli antiqui, avendo quale aveano copia da chi imparare e imitarli, meno era difficile salire in cognizione di quelle supreme arte quali oggi a noi sono faticossissime.’
[12] Grayson, III, Della pittura, p.7
[13] Ibid.
[14]C. Smith, 1992, pp.5-6: ‘E certo questo tempio ha in sè grazia e maiestà: e quello ch’io spesso considerai, mi diletta ch’io veggo in questo tempio iunto insieme una gracilità vezzosa con una sodezza robusta e piena, tale che da una parte ogni suo membro pare posto ad amenità, e dall’altra parte compreendo che ogni cosa qui è fatta e offirmata a perpetuità. Aggiugni che qui abita continuo la temperie, si può dire, della primavera; fuori vento, gelo, brina; qui entro socchiuso da’venti, qui tiepido aere e quiéto: fuori vampe estive e autunnali; qui entro temperatissimo refigerio. E s’egli’è, come è dicono che le delizie sono quando a’nostri sensi aggiungono le cose quanto e quali le richiede la natura, chi dubiterà appellare questo tempio nido delle delizie? Qui dovunque tu miri, vedi ogni parte esposte a giocondità e letizia; qui sempre odoratissimo; e, quel ch’io sopra tutto stimo, qui senti in queste voci al sacrificio, e in questi quali gli antichi chiamano misteri, una soavità maravigliosa.’ Grayson, II, p.107. Smith discusses this passage extensively in the light of rhetorical models (pp.80-97). She is interested principally in its aesthetic content, whereas the present paper is mainly interested in its moral content and its particular imagery.
[15] Alberti conceived the temple as possessing these qualities in De re aedificatoria, VII,3. It should perplex the admiring visitor, so that he cannot decide whether it is more laudible for the skill of its execution or for the fastidiousness of the citizenry in wanting to create such a spectacle, ‘eademque ad gratiamne magis decoremque an ad aeternitatis perpetuitatem faciant.’ (Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.545) Interestingly, Poliziano, in the dedication of the printed edition to Lorenzo de’Medici debated the quality of Alberti’s writing style: was it more to be considered dignified or refined –‘utrum gravior ill sermo fuerit an urbanior.’ Op.cit., p.3. Maestà would serve as translation for the one term and grazia for the other.
[16] See above, The Candid Place 1, note 30
[17] Nicholas of Cusa [get ref.]
[18] See Grayson, III, De pictura/Della pittura, para.28, pp. 50-52
[19] Op.cit., para 40, pp.68-71
[20] Op.cit., para 46, pp.80-83
[21] Orlandi, L’Architettura, Prologue, p.9
[22] Girolamo (Hieronymo) Mancini, Opera inedita et pauca separatim impressa, Florentiae: Sansoni, 1980, pp.236-37; see also Opere Volgari a cura di Cecil Grayson, Vol.II, p.45. The differences are very minor. Grayson concludes ‘poi cosi starete beati.’
[23] In conjuring the image of a traffic between heaven and earth, Alberti is perhaps evoking an identification of the cathedral with a place of great significance in the Old Testament. The identification was made on 25th March 1436 when Dufay’s motet, Nuper Rosarum Flores, was set upon the cantus firmus, ‘Terribilis est locus iste.’ These words are Jacob’s when he awakes from his dream of the angels going up and down the ladder to heaven. He concludes that the place where he has slept is ‘none other but the house of God and … the gate of heaven (Genesis: 28,17).
[24] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.321, l.12-14
[25] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.361, l.1058-62
[26] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, pp.177-78, l.1484-1497
[27] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book III. p.263
[28] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, pp.381-82, l.1596-1600
[29] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.383, l.1647
[30] Orlandi, L’Architettura, VI, 2, p.447
Alberti etc. 
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