Alberti etc.

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  • 9. Alberti The Candid Place 2: appendix

    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.

    10 Giorgio Vasari, Vite …

    [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)

    [20]

    [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)

  • 10. Alberti and Florence Cathedral

    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

  • 11. inn Polyphony

    Alberti’s activities as architect, theorist and advisor, and his clear attempt to ‘cover’ the visual arts by writing a treatise on each of the principal three –architecture, sculpture and painting– perhaps give us an unbalanced sense of the order of his enthusiasms.  We know that his literary activity was very diverse, and he was a literato before all else.  But from his theoretical writings and from his artistic activities, it can easily seem that his primary sense was the visual.  All the while, though, his literary voice is often most animated on the subject of music.  Indeed, in the (auto)biography he claims for himself credentials as a musician as confidently as, in De pictura, he tells of his spectacular perspective demonstrations.  He gives himself almost Orphic powers in the speech of Niccola de’ Medici in Profugiorum ab aerumna: ‘Troppo sarebbe forza qui in Battista, se potesse con suoi strumenti musici adducere gli animi in qual parte e’ volessi.’[1]  Confirmation of his musical ability comes from Cristoforo Landino who, as has been seen, wrote in Apologia di Dante, ‘What branch of mathematics was unknown to him?  He was a geometer, arithmetician, astronomer, musician, and in perspective he was a prodigy, greater than anyone over the centuries.‘[2] It is true that claims for a person’s mathematical expertise could not omit music while it counted in the Quadrivium (or here in the new ‘Quintivium’, with perspective added).  But, equally, no person intending to be mathematically educated would neglect his music.

    Alberti’s definition of beauty is placed within De re aedificatoria for the sake, obviously, of explaining architectural beauty.  He states, ‘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.’[3]  Of importance is his insistence that it applies also universally: ‘in whatsoever subject’ as James Leoni translates.  It is the word concinnitas that is at the core of the definition.  Alberti also wrote, in Book IX, Chapter 5: ‘Hi quidem numeri, per quos fiat ut vovum illa concinnitas auribus gratissima reddatur, hidem ipsi numeri perficiunt, ut oculi animus que voluptate mirifica compleantur.’[4] Harmony is, familiarly, an agreement of voice and ear: ‘Armoniam esse dicimusvocum consonantiam suavem auribus.’[5]  Ear and eye attend to beauties possessing a common substructure that appears in art and nature.  Musical and architectural harmony are interchangeable in his famous admonition to Matteo de’Pasti, his overseer on the project of S. Francesco at Rimini: ‘Le misure e le proportioni de pilastri tu vedi onde elle naschono: cio che tu muti si discorda tutta quella musica.’[6]  The passages carry the assumption that the reader will understand beauty in architecture and in nature, through being already in possession of an understanding of beauty in music.  To be sought in each context is ‘a harmony of parts.’  The beauty he talks of is essentially to be found in complexity.

    However, it is important to note that not all music would supply a level of complexity sufficient to sustain the analogy and thence the definition.  It has become something of a commonplace of Renaissance architectural historiography, since Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1951), to discuss musical harmonics and seek them out in the mathematics of architecture.  Alberti himself followed Pythagoras, and explained musical intervals and the harmonic mean.[7]  But these simple whole-number relations that can be used for proportioning buildings are only part of what he has in mind in his definition of beauty in De re aedificatoria and in a number of other notable utterances on music scattered throughout his writings.

    The property of things whereby their parts fit together locally, quantitatively and qualitatively and they are integral objects is, in Alberti’s thinking, generically a mathematical characteristic.  And his age held music to be a mathematical business alongside the other disciplines of the quadrivium, as was observed above.  However, it is a more complicated mathematics than the arithmetic (with a little geometry) of harmonics and means that produces organic unity.  In fact, it is so complex that Alberti is forced to state his definition in the form of a negative: ‘nothing could be added…’.  Not so much beauty as the want of it is to be observed.  Of collocatio, one of the parts of concinnitas, he says, ‘Ea magis sentitur, ubi male habita est, quam intelligatur per se, qui decenter ponenda sit.’[8]  The ‘innata quaedam ratio’[9] by which we judge the beautiful, at the same time as being so deeply embedded that the human being’s very definition includes the faculty, paradoxically confesses in effect Alberti’s inability to locate it properly in reason, for to say that something is innate is to set it beyond enquiry.

    The music that Alberti alluded to in the definition was of a particular kind.  Like architecture, and Nature herself, it was complex.  In fact, it was itself not so easy to define, and the seeker of an idea of musical beauty might, as readily, have used his/her given experience of a certain kind of formally consistent but complex architecture to help him grasp the nature of this special musical beauty.  Goethe would later draw the connection.

    It is only polyphonic music that can have the ‘harmony of parts’ that is the core of the definition.  Alberti’s thought had an enormously important place for polyphonic music.

    A statement in De familia gives a sense of music’s crucial position.  In its passionate brevity and argumentative directness, and in its evocation of the catechism, it is the nub of Alberti’s creed – that statement that has been central to the discussion of several themes in Alberti’s thought. His interlocutor, Lionardo, voices it:

    Most of all I praise the true and wise teachers who tell us that man was created for the pleasure of God, to recognise the primary and original source of things amid all the variety, dissimilarity, beauty and multiplicity of animal life, amid all the forms, structures, coverings and colors that characterise the animals.  He was made to praise God together with universal nature, seeing in every living thing such great and perfectly matched harmonies of voice and verse and music combined in concord and loveliness.[10]

    Nature herself is a polyphony.  The speech encapsulates nothing less than a Natural Religion.  Everything Alberti says must be consistent with it.  Thus, the same passage, properly analysed, reveals his thought in different connections.  The passages used to introduce the section above, on Faith and Belief, all rise, like this, to their ringing conclusions in celebration of aural experience –bird song or choral singing.  The voice of the poet is more prominent than that of the rationalist at this point.

    Alberti’s conception of polyphony is clearer than Gianozzo Manetti’s.  When Manetti described the Lady Day service of 1436 in Florence Cathedral and talked of the singing, he lapsed into a facile simile: these voices were like those of angels.[11]  [but read on.  Manetti is much more elaborate than I’ve said (p.318) check para 26.] Maybe Dufay’s motet, Nuper Rosarum Flores, famously sung on the occasion, did not draw his attention or live in his memory.  It is agreeable to fancy that Alberti is recollecting the same occasion and the singing of just that motet when, in the voice of Agnolo Pandolfini in Profugiorum ab aerumna, he praises the church, concluding, ‘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.’[12]  Agnolo is here continuing a passage describing the church as an evocation of Spring and the sound, poetically, evokes birdsong, making clear that polyphony, despite Manetti’s experience, does not emanate from heaven.

    The kind of music that excited Alberti is to be identified by thinking through the simile.  Birdsong is not plainchant.  Birds do not sing in unison.  The Bardi St Francis Master’s birds will give responses in unison; not those of the St Francis Master at Assisi.[figs]  Just as it is the variety rather than the uniformity of nature that Lionardo makes the object of his piety, so, in art, it is variety that is to be achieved.  In music, polyphony is proclaimed over plainchant.  The single choral line indicates that faith is complete and entirely unassailable.  That is the music that is angelic.   When Fra Angelico, by including angels playing instruments of different sorts in his scenes of heaven, invites the observer to hear music whose essential character is founded in variety, he does so only to make heaven a more agreeable place:  his inspiration is to be found on earth rather than in heaven.

    For Alberti, polyphony is the exemplification of something important, something more that just an abstractly satisfactory audible state of things.  Nor, to repeat, is it a heavenly emanation (for there is no reason to think that angels would not sing in unison).  Polyphony signifies something; it has a content.  Here, it might be like architecture which, as we see, is more than just formally admirable and materially useful.  Or else, its own principle is universal.[13]

    The moving effects of church music, especially the Kyrie, are described, as Agnolo Pandolfini continues:

    Che è a dire che tutti gli altri modi e varietà de’ canti reiterati fastidiano: solo questo cantare religioso mai meno ti diletta. Quanto fu ingegno in quel Timoteo musico, inventore di tanta cosa! Non so quello s’intervenga agli altri; questo affermo io di me, che e’ possono in me questi canti e inni della chiesa quello a che fine e’ dicono che furono trovati: troppo m’acquetano da ogni altra perturbazione d’animo, e commuovonmi a certa non so quale io la chiami lentezza d’animo piena di riverenza verso di Dio.  E qual cuore sì bravo si truova che non mansueti sé stessi quando e’ sente su bello ascendere e poi descendere quelle intere e vere voci con tanta tenerezza e flessitudine? Affermovi questo, che mai sento in que’ misteri e cerimonie funerali invocare da Dio con que’ versiculi greci aiuto alle nostre miserie umane ch’io non lacrimi. E fra me talora mi maraviglio, e penso quanta forza portino seco quelle a intenerirci. E quinci avviene ch’io credo quello che si dice ch’e’ musici potessero essortare Alessandro Macedone ad arme cantando, e rivocarlo in cena.[14]

    Alberti himself was not committed entirely to church music.  Music had its charms in itself.  For example, it was a means of gaining personal tranquillità dell’anima also elsewhere.  In De iciarchia he noted that, ‘E’ Pittagorici filosofi soleano, prima che dormissero, componere la mente sua a quiete con qualche armonia musica.’[15]  The practice recalls his own in what may be construed as a parallel context.  In Profugiorum ab aerumna, he describes himself as calming his agitated mind by conceiving ‘qualche compositissimo edificio  e disposivi piu ordini e numeri di colonne con vari capitelli e base inusitate…’[16] 

    Alberti is a dogmatic naturalist.  The strength of his commitment can be guaged by setting against Lionardo’s speech, above, the famous statement of Abbot Suger (1081-1155):

    Thus, when –out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God– the loveliness of the many colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the Universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.[17]

    Both dwell upon diversity, but whilst Suger finds it above, Lionardo does, below.  Lionardo’s statement is emphatically anti-platonic.  He finds the grounds of faith in the things of nature: out of his love of the things of Creation comes his affirmation of the Creator.  There is no direct experience of the numinous.  It follows that, in Lionardo’s piety, God is not confined to His House.  The practice of religion is not confined to Church premises.  By extension, the Cathedral of Agnolo Pandolfini was an evocation of natural sensation.  In Theogenius, the tone of the address to Microtiro is religious, and the event happens emphatically en plein air.  Conjured up is a Franciscan sense of the natural world.  Now, choral singing sounds best where the acoustic is best, and the church building is its most appropriate setting.  But that does not mean that the singing itself necessarily supposes that its world is the building in which it is sounding.  Polyphony, because of its complexity, requires a softer acoustic.  The cavernous barrel and groin-vaulted church is not suitable.  Practically speaking, polyphony has less control of the echo than plainchant.  It is possible that elaborate ribbing shortens the echo and softens the acoustic.  Generally speaking, timber roofing was better than masonry for audibility.[18]  Alberti discusses acoustics in Book VIII, Chapter 9 of De re aedificatoria.   Plainchant carries the implication that there is no barrier between the celestial and the faithful.  But polyphony –its variety a celebration of a beauty of nature– conceives itself as terrestial rather than celestial sound.  Polyphony belongs with philosophical scepticism.  Raised in praise, it prompts affirmation; but it does not contain certitude.  It imitates nature.  Rather as the observer of the altarpiece, which has replaced the gold ground with landscape, pictures the action as happening in time and space as opposed to the church (where the object is located) and heaven and eternity (where that which is represented may exist), the listener to polyphonic church music attends an event on earth.  And, as the  gold background disappeared even for celestial scenes, like the Coronations of the Virgin of Fra Angelico in the Louvre and of Fra Filippo Lippi in the Uffizi, so music seems to have begun to be conceived spontaneously in polyphonic form.  Fra Angelico pictures something almost riotously musical, though perhaps without the human voice, in the Uffizi Coronation (fig).

    Alberti’s interest and enthusiasm for music is proclaimed in the  ‘Autobiography’.[19]  It contains the claim that he was, through his education, one of the most distinguished young men of his generation, ‘Nam cum arma et equos et musica instrumente arte et modo tractare, tum litteris et bonarium artium studiis rarissimarumque et difficilarum rerum cognitioni fui deditissimus…’[20]  He would rest from his literary studies in music, painting and physical exercise.  Self-taught, he nonetheless received the applause of the experts, composing and performing instrumental and vocal works:

    Musicam nullis praeceptoribus tenuit et fuere ipsius opera a doctis musicis approbata: cantu per omnem aetatem usus est, sed eo quidem intra privatos parietes aut solus, et praesertim rure cum fratre propinquisve tantum.  Organis delectabatur et inter primarios musicos in ea re peritus habebatur.  Musicos effecit nonnullos eruditiores suis monitis.[21]

    He wrote elegies, eclogues and songs.[22]  The ‘Autobiography’ does not reveal just what sort of music Alberti made and admired; but the impression given is that it was a lively musical society in which he moved.  The likelihood must be that it was an inventive one.

    The importance of music for culture in general is made clear in the prologue to Della pittura.  Alberti recalls a lament that he used to make before his experience of Florence showed that it no longer had grounds.  He listed the kinds of artists and intellectuals that he had believed were in short supply: ‘…pittori, scultori, architetti, musici, iometri, retorici, auguri e simili nobilissimi e maravigioso intelletti…’.[23]  But now they proliferated once more.  If he were to have listed musicians encountered in Florence, Guillaume Dufay, the composer of the motet Nuper Rosarum Flores, sung on the occasion of the dedication of the dome of Florence Cathedral on 25th March 1436, would have been included.

    The imitation of nature had to include the representation of her great principle of variety.  The imitation of Nature as a creative process had to involve an exemplification of the principle.   It is possible to say that, for Alberti, Alcibiades was a polyphonic sort of person, appearing frequently in Alberti’s writings to exemplify the person who changes according to the circumstances in which he finds himself. And Alberti himself, in having his various voices –Libripeta, Lepidus  etc.– did not speak with just one.  It is tempting to think that, in adopting the name Leon, he was claiming kinship with the cameleonte, the cameleon.  Landino took up the idea of Alberti’s cameleon-character in his Apologia di Dante.[24]  To practise a great number of arts and crafts would be further to epitomise variety: ‘ingenio fuit versatili…’[25]  And, if the principle is a natural one, ought it not to be also a social or political one?  Alberti did identify a somewhat democratic property in variety, and it ties in with polyphony, in which there is no question of inferiority or superiority between types of voice.  Apologo XLI tells of the crown of Hadrian.  A pearl wanted to join a diamond and a carbuncle.  The two gems did not want their splendour diminished by the near-presence of the pearl, which eventually found a place elsewhere in the crown, surrounded by the smallest and least valuable jewels.[26]  Alberti’s point is that, if the diamond and the carbuncle had recognised the principle of variety, had seen that they themselves, in their difference, were the beginning of it, and that they suffered in no way as a result, they would have welcomed the addition of the new element of variety.  Instead, the comparison that could now be made between the pearl and its immediate setting emphasised its beauty and value.  Polyphony, like variety, is not hierarchical.

    Variety is an important theme in De pictura/Della pittura.  Like the historia,  ‘Come ne’ cibi e nella musica sempre la novità e abbondanza tanto piace quanto sia differente dalle cose antique e consuete, così l’animo si diletta d’ogni copia e varietà.’[27]  The Latin gives, for ‘abbondanza’, ‘exuberantia’.  He wants copiousness, but it must be disciplined by variety (and appropriateness to the subject).  Copia is a matter of the number of species in the historia, indeed the number of genera for, as well as animal things, there are cities and provinces in the copious historia.  Varietà is a matter of quality.  Members of a single species will be varied, first in their poses and eventually, since the movement of the body is an index of the movement of the soul, in their emotions.  Clarity is consistent with variety.  Too great a throng will confuse the action just as, round Varro’s dinner table, a number greater than nine will make for agitated rather than congenial proceedings.  In contrasting copia with varietà, and dissoluta confusione with composizione [28], Alberti is, in effect, contrasting cacophony and polyphony.  We can suggest that he is considering here two of the three kinds of ‘many’.  The aggregation of lots of the same thing produces a uniform sort of ‘many’.  Alberti’s thinking is about the many that consists of a number of different things with no organisational principle (copia) and the many that is composed and organised (varietà). [29]  He would think on about the quality of what we could call organised multiplicity, and in De re aedificatoria it had become concinnitas.  In music, it was polyphony. 

    In effect, Alberti is saying, through Agnolo Pandolfini describing Florence Cathedral in Profugiorum ab Aerumna, ‘We are not listening to angels (unless angels come down among us and disguise themselves as other flying, singing creatures).’  Not only does the comprehensibility of polyphony delight (though it would be wonderful for the musically skilled person to understand the organisation of the voices, and, axiomatically at least, polyphony is variety in unity); it works also through some other organ of reception.  As Palladio said, ‘Sometimes we like the music but are unable to say why.’[30]  Perhaps the ear is connected to the seat of delight by two routes, one through the head and the other through the heart.[31]  Other theories could be offered: perhaps the organs of sense were active, themselves shaping data.  In saying, in Profugiorum ab aerumna, ‘Per gli orecchi, entra la sapienza,’ Alberti is arguing that organs of sense receive things of reason.[32]  But when Alberti heard Nuper Rosarum Flores, we can be sure that its evocative power was accessible prior to an understanding of its structure, for that is the whole tenor of delight in sound in nature.

    That is, his enthusiasm might have been for a mathematically-based art; but pleasure did not consist in having broken the code.  Consonant with his naturalism, music was intrinsically delightful.  He wrote, ‘Nam, veluti in lyra, cum graves voces respondeant acutis et mediae inter utrasque ad concentum intentae resonant, fit ex vocum varietate sonora et mirifica quaedam proportionum aequibilitas, quae maiorem in modum oblectet animos atque detineat; ita et quibusque reliquis in rebus evenit, quae quidem ad movendos habendosque animos faciant.’[33]

    The age brought forth two great innovations: polyphony in music and perspective in painting.  They had something in common.  The perspective system allows variety and copiousness without confusion, and so does polyphony.  Polyphony represents the crucial property of creation, its organised profusion.  Quantity out of control in painting is clutter, or horror vacui: in music, it is cacophony.  Alberti uses the words tumultuare and tumulto in Della pittura/De pictura of this horror vacui.  In nature it would be Hell.[34]

    ______

    Of course, it’s a zeitgeist-lich enthusiasm (we could gather examples – Fra Angelico, Luca della Robbia, Fra Filippo, Benozzo.  Alberti seems the obvious intermediary between Nicholas and Fra Angelico in the papal chapel), Alberti does seem to have made it part of his philosophic system.  (Federigo says that architecture is the offspring of arithmetic and geometry; but we’d expect him to have something to say about music too.  Is there evidence that he was interested in polyphonic music?)

     Is there any chance that the programme was changed in 1436?   Robert Mode gives a precis of the various arguments about the dates of the panels.  He favours Pope-Hennessy’s interpretation of a document (26.08.34) giving a date of 1434.(Adolescent Confratelli and the Cantoria of Luca della Robbia, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 68, No. 1. (Mar., 1986), pp. 67-71)  Pope-Hennessy’s argument depends upon the side panels being worth seven-twelfths of the front ones.  Unfortunately, he seems to be right.  The front panels are about 1.7 times the side  35 to 60 (florins) is 1.71.  Dufay didn’t get to Florence till 1435

    Luca della Robbia’s Singing Gallery started off as a straight representation of Psalm 150.  When the side panels with the singers ( so much more brilliant in style) were added the programme was amplified, or changed.  The gallery became capable of accommodating a polyphony of voices; it was converted from being a general idea of musical celebration and praise into an imitation of what actually went on there.  The components of the musical performance are spelled out punctiliously in the panel of the from of the Cantoria.  If  the side panels are also illustrative it would be of the last line: ‘Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD’.  Luca has represented the universe of praise by the variety of voices; treble, alto and bass.  Actually, the instrumental complexity of the front is also quite polyphonic.

    Worth comparing with Luca’s end panels are the two in the Bode Museum, Berlin, in one of which angels are attending to the tuning of a lute and in the other choristers are singing, but in unison.

    There’s singing in Fra Angelico’s Fiesole altarpiece, but diffidently.

    Angels in the trees in Gentile da Fabriano’s Madonna and Cild with a Donor have a variety of instruments.  They are clearly like birds with a variety of sounds/calls.

    [Now, there is evidence from elsewhere that Alberti believed that there was an intelligent and a affective response to things, so that the learned and the unlearned were, equally, able to take pleasure  and instruction from the historia.  Was the final sensation before the historia like that at a polyphonic choral performance? (check Della pittura for musical analogies)  Did Alberti intend a parallel?  Of his ‘demonstrations’, in the Biography, it is said, ‘…et erant eiusmodi, ut periti imperitique non pictas, sed veras ipsas res naturae intueri decertarent.’ [73]  Della pittura: L’opera del pittore cerca essere grata a tutta la moltitudine.(p.104, 62)  See also p.68, 40]

    See, at the end of Florence Cathedral section, ref. to P. Weiss, p.81: Alberti on the musicians in attendance at the service of 25.03.36

    ———————-

    It is truly marvellous to relate how the whole surface of the earth exulted with joy and praise when the goddess first set foot on land.  Never mind how exhilarated the breezes, the springs, the streams and hills became at the approach of the goddess!  You could see flowers bursting out of even the roughest flint, smiling far and wide at the goddess as she went by, bending down to do her homage, and breathing out every fragrance to fill her path with sweet odors.  You would have seen melodious birds flying around her applauding with painted wings and greeting the visiting gods with their song.[35]

    Oh, my dear Microtiro, how greatly was sweet friendship ever to be prized! […] But, if it would please you, let us sit here among these myrtles – this place no less delightful than your vast theatres and most sumptuous temples.  Here, raised by nature, columns as numerous as the loftiest trees that you see around.  Above us, the sun, – we, shaded most delightfully by these beech trees and firs; and all around us, at every turn, you see the thousand exquisite colours of the flowers in their profusion, woven into the vivid green of the shadows, more intense more limpid than the sky; and to please you, the most ravishing fragrances.  And then, the joyful celebration of the little birds that throng about you in their brightest and richest plumage – who could not take delight?  So beautiful they are as, again and again, they come to greet me with their fresh songs raised to the heavens.[36]

    Agnolo Pandolfini: 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.[37]

    [The passage continues.  I can’t think that it’s Alberti’s own view that only church singing is not irritating.] Che è a dire che tutti gli altri modi e varietà de’ canti reiterati fastidiano: solo questo cantare religioso mai meno ti diletta. Quanto fu ingegno in quel Timoteo musico, inventore di tanta cosa! Non so quello s’intervenga agli altri; questo affermo io di me, che e’ possono in me questi canti e inni della chiesa quello a che fine e’ dicono che furono trovati: troppo m’acquetano da ogni altra perturbazione d’animo, e commuovonmi a certa non so quale io la chiami lentezza d’animo piena di riverenza verso di Dio. E qual cuore sì bravo si truova che non mansueti sé stessi quando e’ sente su bello ascendere e poi descendere quelle intere e vere voci con tanta tenerezza e flessitudine? Affermovi questo, che mai sento in que’ misteri e cerimonie funerali invocare da Dio con que’ versiculi greci aiuto alle nostre miserie umane ch’io non lacrimi.[the Kyrie?] E fra me talora mi maraviglio, e penso quanta forza portino seco quelle a intenerirci. E quinci avviene ch’io credo quello che si dice ch’e’ musici potessero essortare Alessandro Macedone ad arme cantando, e rivocarlo in cena.

    Niccola: Siete voi, Agnolo, in questa opinione che queste conversioni e coniunzioni di voci possino levare gli animi e imporre in loro vari eccitamenti e commozioni? Troppo sarebbe forza qui in Battista, se potesse con suoi strumenti musici adducere gli animi in qual parte e’ volessi.  Goes on to question Plato’s view that nouva ragion di canti  always causes public disorder.  It might be an effect, but not a cause.

    [a few pages from the end] A me aggradono alcuni altri rimedi forse non dissimili da questi, ma più degni e più convenienti a uno uomo moderato e constantissimo. E in prima mi piace quello omerico Achille, quale per requiescere dalle molte sue faccende militari solea sedare l’animo cantando insieme col plettro e colla lira, instrumento musico. Quinci credo el nostro Virgilio introdusse quel suo Polifemo in antro, quem

    Lanigerae comitantur oves; ea sola voluptas

    solamenque mali de collo fistula pendet.

    E certo in questo convengo io colla opinione de’ pittagorici quali affermavano che ‘l nostro animo s’accoglieva e componeva a tranquillità e a quiete revocato e racconsolato dalle suavissime voci e modi di musica. E provai io non rarissimo questo in me, che in mie lassitudini d’animo questa dolcezza e varietà de’ suoni e del cantare molto mi sullevorono e restituirono. E proverrete questo voi, se mai v’accade: mai vi s’avvolgerà pell’animo e mente alcuna sì cocente cura che subito ella non si estingua ove voi perseverrete cantando. E non so come a me pare che ‘l cantare mio qualunque e’ sia, più a me satisfaccia e più giovi che ‘l sonare di qualunque altri forse fusse ottimo ed essercitatissimo musico. Né fu senza commodo instituto quel costume antiquissimo, qual poi interdisse el concilio arelatense, che le escubie funerali si vegghiassero cantando. Credo io così faceano que’ buoni antiqui per distorre l’animo da que’ tristi pensieri del morire. Ma a questi nostri religiosissimi forse parse più utile el ricordarsi d’essere uomo simile a quel morto; e parsegli officio più pio riconoscersi mortale e d’ora in ora caduco che darsi ad alcuna levità e lascivia.(electronic)

    Most of all I praise the true and wise teachers who tell us that man was created for the pleasure of God, to recognise the primary and original source of things amid all the variety, dissimilarity, beauty and multiplicity of animal life, amid all the forms, structures, coverings and colors that characterise the animals.  He was made to praise God together with universal nature, seeing in every living thing such great and perfectly matched harmonies of voice and verse and music combined in concord and loveliness.[38]

    Nam, veluti in lyra, cum graves voces respondeant acutis et mediae inter utrasque ad concentum intentae resonant, fit ex vocum varietate sonora et mirifica quaedam proportionum aequibilitas, quae maiorem in modum oblectet animos atque detineat; ita et quibusque reliquis in rebus evenit, quae quidem ad movendos habendosque animos faciant(p.69).’  ‘Just as in music, where deep voices answer high ones, and intermediate ones are pitched between them, and they ring out in harmony, a wonderfully sonorous balance of proportions results, which increases the pleasure of the audience and captivates them; so it happens in everything else that serves to enchant and move the mind.’(I,9)  {the church also waylays the passer-by]

    ?

    Adovardo, analysing amicizia in Book IV of Della famiglia is like Brunelleschi in the Prologue.

    Prologue

    Book IV of Della famiglia looks like an enlargement (for harmony with the other books) of a core text (the short piece?)

    Alberti refers to the musical consonance of the columniation of the façade of S. Francesco at Rimini (Il misure e le proportioni tu vedi onde nascono)  (is it the arch and pier system, or is it what’s planned at the east end?)

    Squarcialupi, organist at the Cathedral (1417-80)

    So also in IX, 5: ‘…a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts within a body…’

    VII,3 In the Christian basilica, altar, choir and trbune are grouped together.  Otherwise, the church consists of nave and portico.

    Practical acoustics – the Curia – De re VIII, 9.

    Disappointingly, I find no section of De re where he was thinking about choral singing.  In the passage on the basilica and that on the curia it’s clear that he is alert to what’s required for the spoken voice to be effective.

    Alberti’s association with the choir of SS Annunziata.  Choral music was very important at SS Annunziata. (Note perhaps that the rotonda at S Francesco at Rimini could have been for choral purposes.  Was there at choir at the Pantheon?)  The controversy of the early 1470s concerned the choir

    See Robert L. Mode Article on the Confratelli and Luca’s Cantoria in Art Bulletin 1986 (detail in Lady Day quotes).

    Fra Angelico wanted us to hear all the instruments of the orchestra.

    There’s a band to the right in the Solomon and Sheba panel.

    The central of the three figures immediately behind Solomon is in profile, and looks like Alberti (at any rate the Matteo de’ Pasti version).  There are other portraits in this panel, for example the turbaned man behind and up.

    Profugiorum (127): Per gli orecchi, entra la sapienza

    Quintillian has music, the soul and number connected (1.1.72)

    De iciarchia: E’ Pittagorici filosofi soleano, prima che dormissero, componere la mente sua a quiete con qualche armonia musica.  Cf. Alberti making us buildings late at night( Poss. Footnote to passage in Alberti’s Way of Thinking)

    Thinking about acoustics – V,8 end.  Vaulted spaces no good for singing etc.  see also, his discussion of the echo-breaking effect of the cornice in the curia.

    See Alberti Notes

    Profugiorum, Bk III, p.58: E certo in questo convengo io colla opinione de’ pittagorici quali affermavano che ’l nostro animo s’accoglieva e componeva a tranquillità e a quiete revocato e racconsolato dalle suavissime voci e modi di musica. E provai io non rarissimo questo in me, che in mie lassitudini d’animo questa dolcezza e varietà de’ suoni e del cantare molto mi sullevorono e restituirono. E proverrete questo voi, se mai v’accade: mai vi s’avvolgerà pell’animo e mente alcuna sì cocente cura che subito ella non si estingua ove voi perseverrete cantando. E non so come a me pare che ’l cantare mio qualunque e’ sia, più a me satisfaccia e più giovi che ’l sonare di qualunque altri forse fusse ottimo ed essercitatissimo musico.

    [1] Leon Battista Alberti, Opere Volgari, a cura di Cecil Grayson, Vol. II, Bari: Laterza, 1966, Profugiorum ab aerumna, p.109, lines 10-12

    [2] See above, Post Mortem 1, note 4 [Ref. get]

    [3] L.B. Alberti, L’Architettura, a cura di G. Orlandi, Introd. P. Portoghesi (Milano: Polifilo, 1966), Book VI, Chapter 2, p.447

    [4] Orlandi, L’Architettura, IX, 5, p.823

    [5] Orlandi, L’Architettura, IX, 5, p.823

    [6] Franco Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti: L’opera completa, Electa: Milano, 1986, p.133. fig 135

    [7] Alberti, De re aedificatoria, IX, 4 and 5

    [8] Orlandi, L’Architettura, IX,7, p.837

    [9] Orlandi, L’Architettura, IX, 5, p.813

    [10]Reneé Watkins, 1969, p.134: ‘Ma sopra tutte lodo quella verissima et probatissima sententia di coloro, e quali dicono l’uomo essere creato per piacere a Dio, per riconoscere un primo et vero principio alle cose, ove si vegga tanta varietà, tanta dissimilitudine, bellezza et multitudine d’animali, di loro forme, stature, vestimenti et colori; per ancora lodare Iddio insieme con tutta l’universa natura, vedendo tante et si differentiate et si consonante armonie di voci, versi et canti in ciascuno animante concinni et soave…’ Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.162, l.1786-1794.  Here, I use Watkins’ admirable translation.  There will be occasions below where I offer my own  translation instead. I do so in order to allow myself slightly more paraphrased readings of the passages. My translations are identifiable by my omission of the page references to Watkins.

    [11] Eugenio Battista, Il Mondo Visuale delle Fiabe, Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, V, 1960, Umaniesimo e Esoterismo, pp.291-320, contains Giannozzo Manetti’s Oration (Iannozii Manetti oratio ad clarissimum equestris ordinis virum Angelum Accaiuolum de secularibus et pontificlibus pompis in consecratione Basilicae Florentinae habitis incipit feliciter), pp.310-20: ‘Interea tantis tamque variis canoris vocibus quandoque concinebatur: tantis etiam simphonis ad coelum usque elatis interdum cantabatur ut angelici ac divini cantus mirium audientibus apparerent: adeoque audientium aures mira variarum vocum suavitate titillabantur: ut multum admodum ceu de syrenum cantibus fabulantur obstupescere videnture: quod in coelis etiam quot annis hac ipsa solemnissima die qua principium humanae salutatis apparuit ab angelis fieri non impie crederim…’(pp.317-18)  This was evidently a polyphonic piece and therefore more likely the motet of Dufay, which would, in any case, make a fine accompaniment to the appearance of the pope within the church.  Manetti is equally delighted by the singing at the elevation of the host, but it was probably plainchant for he makes no mention this time of various voices.

    [12]Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, (O.U.P.: New York & Oxford, 1992, pp.5-6 (translation); ‘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:

    [13] Rykwert et al, p.305; Orlandi, L’Architettura,  IX, 5, p.823: ‘Hi quidem numeri, per quos fiat ut vovum illa concinnitas auribus gratissima reddatur, hidem ipsi numeri perficiunt, ut oculi animus que voluptate mirifica compleantur.’

    [14] Grayson, II, Profugiorum ab aerumna, p. 107-8, ’28-17

    [15] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, p.242, l.10-12

    [16] Grayson, II, Profugiorum ab aerumna, p.182, l.4-5

    [17] Get Abbot Suger passage.  Panofsky

    [18] See, Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VII,3.

    [19] Renée Watkins gives a useful summing up of scholarly opinion on the question of the text being an autobiography or not.  She herself makes a persuasive case for its being autobiography.  Studies in the Renaissance, edited by M.A. Schaaber, Vol.IV, New York, 1957, pp.101-112.

    [20] R. Furbini & A. Menci Gallorini, “L’Autobiographia di Leon Battista Alberti”, Rinascimento, Vol.12, 2nd Ser., 1972[? check], [pp.68-78] p.68

    [21] Op.cit., p.69

    [22] Op.cit., p.70

    [23] Grayson, III, Della pittura, p.7

    [24] See above, Post-mortem 1, note 5

    [25] Furbini & Gallorini, p.68

    [26] L.B. Alberti, Apologhi, a cura di Marcello Ciccuto, Milano,: Rizzoli, 1989, p.85

    [27] Grayson, III, De pictura/Della pittura, pp.68/69, para 40

    [28] Ibid.

    [29] Alberti returns to the matter of painting lots of different things.  In the Italian he writes only about copia but in the Latin, about varietas too.  Op.cit., p.102/3, para 60.

    [30] Andrea Palladio, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura [get]

    [31] In De amore, addressing Paolo Codagnello, Alberti, having begun by considering pleasure and pain in relation separately to soul and body, contemplates them in alliance: ‘Forse ancora sarebbe chi dicessi alcuni altri piaceri essere insieme e all’animo e al corpo gratissimi, come udire da ottimi musici e poeti cantare in presenza le laude tue e di chi tu ami, vedere onorar te insieme e i tuoi pregiati e lieti.’  Grayson, III, p.251

    [32] Grayson, II, Profugiorum ab aerumna, p.107, l.27

    [33] Orlandi, L’Architettura, I,9, p.69; ‘Just as in music, where deep voices answer high ones, and intermediate ones are pitched between them, and they ring out in harmony, a wonderfully sonorous balance of proportions results, which increases the pleasure of the audience and captivates them; so it happens in everything else that serves to enchant and move the mind.’(Rykwert et al, p.24)

    [34] Grayson, III, De pictura/Della pittura, p.68/9, 40

    [35]L.B. Alberti, Momus, Book I, p.41/43, para 40: ‘Dea ut primum appulit ad terras, mirabile dictu quantum universa terrarum facies plausa laetitiaque gestiret!  Sino quid aurae, quid fontes, quid flumina, quid colles adventu deae exhilarati sint.  Videbas flores vel ipso praeduro ex silice erumpere praetereuntique deae late arridere et venerando acclinare, omnesque suavitatum delicias, ut odoratissimum id iter redderent, expromere.  Vidisses et canoras alites propter advolitantes circim applaudere pictis alis, modoque vocis deos hopites consalutare.’(p.40-42)

    [36]Cecil Grayson, Teogenio, in Opere Volgari, Vol.II, 1966, p. 57-8: ‘O Microtiro mio, quanto fu sempre da pregiare la dolce amicizia! […]  Ma sediamo, se cosi ti piace, fra questi mirti, luogo non meno delizioso che i vostri teatri e templi amplissimi e suntuosisimi.  Qui colonne fabricate dalla natura tante quante tu vedi albori ertissimi.  Qui sopra dal sole noi copre ombra lietissima di questi faggi e abeti, e atorno, dovunque te volgi, vedi mille perfettissimi colori di vari fiori intessuti fra el verde splendere in fra l’ombra, e vincere tanto lustro e chiarore del cielo; e a gratificarti suavissimi odori.  E poi la festività di questi quali tu in presenza vedi uccelletti con sue piume dipintissimi e ornatissimi, a chi non dilettasse?  Bellissimi, che d’ora in ora vengono con nuovi canti lodano i cieli a salutarmi!’  The preference is expressed for the natural over the artificial.  Charon, in Book IV of Momus, expresses, several times, the same preference.  He dispraises the theatre and praises instead the flower: ‘…shall I admire stones?  Everything about a flower is beautiful and pleasing.  In these man-made constructions, you won’t find anything wondrous apart from the wondrous extravagance of misplaced labour.’ (p.313, para 48) *(one wonders is he has S. Maria del Fiore in mind) (p….)

    [37]Christine 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:

    [38]René Watkins, 1969, p.134: ‘Ma sopra tutte lodo quella verissima et probatissima sententia di coloro, e quali dicono l’uomo essere creato per piacere a Dio, per riconoscere un primo et vero principio alle cose, ove si vegga tanta varietà, tanta dissimilitudine, bellezza et multitudine d’animali, di loro forme, stature, vestimenti et colori; per ancora lodare Iddio insieme con tutta l’universa natura, vedendo tante et si differentiate et si consonante armonie di voci, versi et canti in ciascuno animante concinni et soave…’ Romano, Tenente, Furlan, p.162, l.1786-1794.  Here, I use Watkins’ admirable translation.  There will be occasions below where I offer my own  translation instead. I do so in order to allow myself slightly more paraphrased readings of the passages. My translations are identifiable by my omission of the page references to Watkins.

    [1]

  • 12. Porticoes and Piazzas

    Alberti deprecated the invisibility of the clergy.[2]  In De iciarchia, Battista, the primary interlocutor, ostensibly concentrates upon the character and actions of the paterfamilias.  But reducing the discussion to the scale of the domestic stage is a stratagem.  Alberti’s readers are to know that what applies to the family applies at the level of the republic.  And the Church too is a sort of republic.  The churchman is to conduct himself like anyone with command over others.  ‘Quelli saranno qui nel numeri de’ primi [ie. hierarchs] quali sanno e vogliono essere utilissimi a’ suoi, e con studio e diligenza curano il bene di tutti gli altri.[3]  It is a vigilant sort of authority that is laudible – one like that of the spider in the centre of its web, to which Alberti likened the paterfamilias in De Familia.[4] He is to be active and visible.

    According to Giannozzo Manetti, in the Life of Nicholas V, the pope’s visibility was a central theme of the design of the chapel that it was proposed be added at the liturgical east end of the church of St Peter’s: ‘In summitate vero tribunae solium pontificale altiuscule eminebat, ut et ipse ab omnibus circumstantibus videtur, ac pariter omnes adstantes sedentesque videret.[5]  It is interesting, then, that, in mid-fifteenth-century Rome, a further prominent architectural act of what could be called ‘clerical monstrance’ was made, again within the milieu in which Alberti moved or – just after his death – had moved.  In other words, there is reason to believe that there was a grouping of like-minded clergy who were of the same view as Alberti and who set about addressing the criticism of invisibility by architectural means.

    Pius II initiated the digging of the foundations of the Benediction Loggia in 1461 and the transportation of six columns from the Portico of Octavia.[6]  Platina, in his Lives of the Popes, pointed to the pope’s purpose of making himself visible, that is, doing the opposite of what Alberti accused Nicholas’s bishops of doing: ‘He (Pius) was mightily pleased with building, and at his charge were the steps in the Vatican Church repaired, the portico of it made glorious and strong, and he had a design to carry the rubbish from before the church door and pave the Piazza.  He was about to make a portico, from whence the Pope might bless the people.’[7]  Alexander VI added the third storey.[fig.]    

    Given Pius’ employment of Bernardo Rossellino at Pienza and the all’antica character of the loggia, his name has been offered as architect.  In summer 1464, a stone carver was dispatched from Rome to collect the design.[8] The Florentine connection also points to Bernardo.  However, two points make questionable the proposition that the work was his.  One is that the loggia is not, as a design, all-of-a-piece.  It shows signs of having been built in two or even three separable phases.  That is, although the building work continued long after Pius’s time and  other masters were involved, including Giuliano da Sangallo and Bramante, an authoritative design did not exist, and authorship as well as execution becomes divisible.[9] The other is that, within Bernardo’s oeuvre, there is a work – the façade of the cathedral at Pienza – that displays such a muddle-headed conception of the antique, that it must be supposed that, where he did not sink to that level, he was benefitting from the advice or direction of others.  The loggia, if he were involved, would be one projected under tutelage.

    Although the loggia no longer stands, it was illustrated often enough that its form in large part can be established with some confidence.  The most articulate representation is Marten van Heemskerk’s of the 1530s.  The composition of what appear to be piers supporting round arches with applied half-columns and pilasters indicates the work’s indebtedness to the Colosseum.  The cortile of the Palazzo Venezia – on two levels – is similar.  Van Heemskerk’s drawing shows four arches on three levels.  Pedestals for two more columniations are to be seen, and corresponding with the distance of the northmost pedestal from the parapet of the stairway into the Platea Sancti Petri are more fragments of masonry.  Evidently, the four arches were intended to become seven.  Pius II, as has been seen, referred to six columns being brought from the Portico of Octavia, near the Theatre of Marcellus. [Get the numbers right.  I’ve said seven above.]  Alfarano describes ‘…quinque parastatis cum columnis’, and his famous engraving of the plan of Old St Peters shows only little circles representing the columns.[10] Van Heemskerk’s drawing shows half-columns, and pilasters are applied at levels two and three.  The same seems to be the arrangement at ground level.  Could the columns be half-sunk in piers?  Alfarano’s convention contradicts such a notion.(fig)  It is that circles within squares indicate that plinth and shaft belong together.  Here, he shows that the shafts are independent objects.  In his hand-drawing of 1571, Alfarano tries to indicate more about the columns or their pedestals by showing the circles of the shafts within what look like short-armed Greek crosses (Fig.) 

    It is possible that Pius’s columns were never used.  However, in the event that they were, the columns must have stood free-standing before the piers.  Marten van Heemskerk’s drawing is difficult to interpret as showing a combination of piers and columns at ground level. If they are columns at ground level, they must have had elements serving as plinths for the order above stepping forward from the plane of the piers very boldly.  It is unlikely that that second order was of columns rather than half-columns, for the third level is undoubtedly provided with pilasters.  A step-back by degrees from column to half-column, to pilaster is also suggested by the forward-stepping frieze blocks above the second level.   The ‘columns’ were presumably secured to the plane of the wall behind by ties.  In the building drawn by Van Heemskerk, an error in Roman usage was made at the level of the tops of the capitals of the lowest storey with the placing of the stones acting as plinths of the second level directly atop.  An entablature block should have been used.  Such a move would have obviated the need for the pedestals of the second level to be excessively tall. There is considerable difficulty for the observer trying to locate the floor-level of the piano nobile.  A string course has run at the level of the apices of the archivolts and has coincided with the astagals of the capitals.  It is likely that the need was to achieve the floor level of the wing to which the loggia is attached.  Windows resting on a string course to the north of the loggia imply a floor level in line with the bottom of the balustrade of the first-floor loggia.  Unfortunately, the string course of the windows above does not align with the balustrade of the top level correspondingly, but rather with the cornice of the entablature separating second and third storeys.  In any event, there is a deeper void between the first and second compared with the second and third.  The difference is perhaps owing to the need to adapt to floor levels within the palace; but the effect of disparity could have been mitigated if the correct usage had been followed and a full entablature been set atop the ground level colonnade.  The oddity of the colonnade supporting a cornice must have looked very awkward where the step-forwards occurred.  Between second and third levels, a stepped-forward entablature above the columns is correct and comfortable.  The archivolts rise to the level of the architrave and there is no stringcourse aligning with astragals.  The top level has pilasters instead of columns, and the architrave above steps forward only above the northernmost one.  The roof as-it-were rests prematurely, for the entablature is incomplete. [this is all offered, at this stage, without much confidence]

    The anomaly of the missing architrave and frieze between the first and second storeys and the heightening of the bases of the upper pedestals is consistent with Bernardo’s action on the façade of the Cathedral of Pienza, the building that reveals his own confused thinking about ancient architecture.(fig)  The façade really is rather unpleasant.  Four pedestals support pilaster bands that rise through two levels to the level of the pediment or gable.  In the entrant angles of the pilasters are columns.  At the top of the first level, as at the Benediction Loggia, they support a cornice, instead of a complete entablature, which in turn supports the columns of the second level.  Arches spring from each upper pair of columns.  The central span is greater than the lateral ones; but because of the pediment it cannot rise higher.  Bernardo has simply inserted in the middle an arch that is less than a semi-circle.  His thinking here is to be contrasted with Alberti’s at Rimini.  The central arch of the façade of the Tempio Malatestiano rises to the level of the entablature whilst, in the narrower side bays, the arches rise to a lesser height.  The small all’antica details at Pienza are very well designed and executed; but Bernardo’s understanding does not extend to the principles of construction and assembly.  Differences between the Palazzo Piccolomini next to the cathedral and the Palazzo Rucellai (where he is credited with the execution of Alberti’s design) are to be accounted for, then, not by reference to the relatively rustic context of the former but to Rossellino’s vagueness.  Perhaps too it was when he was not under Alberti’s invigilation that, at the Palazzo Rucellai, the two bays, upper right, were built with their misaligned rustication.

    The fault in combining columns and cornice is common to the Pienza Cathedral façade and the Benediction Loggia.  So, there are grounds for finding Bernardo at work unsupervised through the whole process of construction of the cathedral façade, and at the point where the loggia was to continue beyond the tops of the first storey columns.  There is no particular reason to give him responsibility for the design at ground level.  The use of pedestals, if it was not a means to reach the necessary height for an entablature using spoglia columns that were too short, at this stage was a sign of a sophisticated understanding of ancient Roman architecture.  They were used in the cortile grande of the Palazzo Venezia.(fig)  Neither the Colosseum or the Theatre of Marcellus use them on the ground level.  The loggia of San Marco (fig) – another instance of architectural monstance – follows these precedents more fastidiously than does the Benediction Loggia.  The Loggia itself began to rise as a building promising to adhere to the most rigorous Roman rules.  It forgot them for a brief and crucial moment before resuming its sage way.  The fact that the error between levels one and two was corrected between levels two and three indicates that the error was not immediately apparent.  If it had been, it could have been remedied.  Therefore, it seems likely that building went ahead, raising the piers of the piano nobile, until 1470 when ‘maestro Julianus Francisci di Florentia’ was required ‘perficere quattuor arcus dicte Benedictionis nunc existentes … secundum quod superaedificare quattuor arcus ad altitudinem designatum scapellinis…’[11] The model collected from Florence by the stone-cutter in 1464 did not correct the error; but, around 1470, the correct way ahead had been established.

    What is needed for an attribution of the Benediction Loggia is a more-informed architect than Bernardo Rossellino, and perhaps one whose direction of the work was remote and intermittent.  Alberti, of course, would qualify on those grounds.  A couple of circumstantial points may be added.  Alberti was interested in making the Colosseum serve as a model for the architecture of his own age.  The Palazzo Rucellai is an example – a meditation upon the combining of the arcuated with the trabeated in a systematic way. (fig)  It represents its conclusions in graphic rather than plastic terms; but a drawing of the Colosseum can readily be imagined alongside it.  The main differences are that the arches of the Palazzo Rucellai rise short of the entablatures by a greater amount, and the level without the arcuations at the top of the Colosseum appears at ground level in Alberti’s building, where, as at the Benediction Loggia, the pilasters stand on pedestals.  Were the Palazzo Rucellai to be rendered in fully plastic terms, pedestals and entablatures would have to break forward in column-alignments.  Alberti also used pedestals at ground level of the façade of Santa Maria Novella for the four Corinthian columns.

    The Benediction Loggia – and the loggia at San Marco – also had a raison d’etre that stands outside of architectural formalism and antiquarian reference.  And in having it, it satisfied a requirement that was very important for Alberti.  The Loggia was to do with visibility. Alberti’s thought is often hidden in metaphor.  Father, spider, city – all have the virtue of vigilance.  The loggia can be their architectural companion.  Here he is, on the city in De re aedificatoria, IV, 2: ‘Moreover your city ought to stand in the middle of its territory, in a place from whence it can have a view of all its country, and watch its opportunities, and be ready whenever necessity calls…’[12]  This city is very like the spider.  The loggia has a gaze directed in just one direction and, like a picture, is observable from just one side.  The vast numbers expected in the Platea Sancti Petri could see the pope and the clergy in their polyptych richness and profusion.  Equally, the arcades looked upon the scene and promised a surveillance of the piazza, a vigilant eye, perhaps, upon the virtue of the faithful.  Had all seven ranks of three arches been constructed, entrance to the atrium of the church and to the palace would have involved an undifferentiated architectural experience.  The structure becomes the very image of candour – of the hierarch’s openness to scrutiny and of the family’s congregational warmth.

    The conception of the Benediction Loggia is to be connected with plans made for the Platea Sancti Petri during the pontificate of Pius II.  One of the great events of Pius’ life would seem, from his Commentaries, to have been the reception in 1462 of the Head of St Andrew, presented by Thomas Paleologus of Mistra.[13] At last, St Andrew would be reassembled.  The church already claimed to possess his body, as Giovanni Rucellai noted when he visited in 1449.[14]  A monumental set of steps was created across the front of the Church of St Peter’s and the palace, where a huge raised platform served as apron to the buildings.  Martin van Heemskerk’s drawing shows the arrangement.  Two giant statues were made to stand on pedestals on either side of the staircase at the level of the faithful.  Saints Peter and Paul were sentinels directing the path of the faithful to the shrine itself.

    As early as the pontificate of Nicholas V, according to Giannozzo Manetti in his account of the pope’s plans, there was a proposal to regularise the streets passing from the Castel Sant’ Angelo to the Platea Sancti Petri.  There were to be three porticoed approaches.  The planned northern street ended opposite the entrance to the Vatican Palace, the central street, the entrance to St Peter’s and the southern pointed towards the obelisk and the Canonica.   Pope, Peter and clergy were the three goals, and the pilgrims would predominate on the central street.  Dignitaries, pilgrims and clergy were projected from sun and rain.  Similar solicitude would have been shown them – especially pilgrims – by Alberti as they crossed the Ponte Sant’Angelo, if Vasari correctly attributed a drawing of the bridge that he possessed.  He wrote, of his book of drawings, “…nelle quali e disegnato il ponte Sant’Angelo, ed il coperto che col disegno suo vi fu fatto a uso di loggia, per difesa del sole nei tempi di state, e delle pioggie e de’ venti l’inverno: la qual’opera gli fece far papa Nicola V…’[15]  In other words, the porticoed streets and the covered Ponte Sant’Angelo were of a piece, at least as far as concern for public comfort was concerned.  [cf. Florence Cathedral in Apologi [check here]  The project seems to have anticipated the import of Agnolo Pandolfini’s estimation of works of the time of Pius.  The Platea Sancti Petri was nothing less than a vast outdoor church.  The three streets, from the perspective of the Piazza Sant’ Angelo, corresponded with the three doorways of grand churches.  The congregational space upon which they opened passed right up to the staircase and podium, which corresponded to the sanctuary of a church.  The Benediction Loggia would be a virtually Colossal spectacle, capable of transformation into something more marvellous than anything that could be achieved elsewhere in Christendom (unless the climactic experience was the shrine of the prince of the apostles itself, whose need for the dramatic enframing of Nicholas’ new chapel arch at the liturgical east end was increased by the quality of the exterior spectacle).  It was accommodation fit for the heavenly host.  The outdoor church of St Peter’s had not yet been completed, but Pius’ plan for it seems to be relatively clear.

    A similar though more modest arrangement of loggia and nave-like public space was at S. Marco.  There, the portico is of three arches on piers on two levels, with applied half-columns at ground level and pilasters above.  When the Palazzetto was located to the right of the loggia, the public space was enclosed differently from nowadays, when it has been shifted to the southwest corner of the Palazzo Venezia’s insula.  Again, Alberti has been mentioned by some scholars in connection with Pietro Barbo’s works on the palazzo.[16]  But how he stood in relation to Barbo’s social milieu is perhaps problematic, partly because Alberti was a a member of the College of Papal Abbreviators which Paul II disbanded in 1466 for harbouring anti-papal thinking and paganistic tendencies.  As has been seen, Alberti’s sympathies seem to have accorded with those of the College, if Paul’s charges were well-founded.  However, Alberti did express them more covertly than, say, Platina, who was imprisoned as a subversive.[17]  If a Colosseum-based design was needed, and especially if the need was felt before 1466, Alberti was the person to go to.  Since 1450, and his design for the Tempio Malatestiano, he had used it.  The cortile grande at the Palazzo Venezia shows what the Benediction Loggia aspired to in terms of ancient Roman correctness.

    The San Marco Loggia seems to belong to a more experimental stage of loggia design, especially in the treatment of the pilasters in the lower porch: they have bases but, instead of capitals, they have at top elements of cornice above which spring the transverse arches of the vault.  The building could be said to be under-designed or else the building-work under-supervised.  This is a common feature of Alberti’s architecture.  At Mantua, the churches of San Sebastiano and Sant’ Andrea are a long way from his intentions.  Although, at the Palazzo Rucellai, there was clearly a drawing that attempted to exert most rigorous control over the work, it did not prevail in the two upper right-side bays, as has been seen.  Alberti’s designs do not seem to have had unimpeachable authority or received unquestioning loyalty.  It could be because they remained imperfectly resolved or because of the extra link in the chain of command that he himself represented.  In any case, it has been speculated here that Alberti was often present at that somewhat messy stage of planning and design, when decisions had not yet been definitively made and when the initiation of the idea was not readily to be allocated to one individual.  The Benediction Loggia seems to have developed out of similar circumstances.

    The open-air church of San Marco was relatively rudimentary.[check Ricci so see if the upper window of the Tempio Malatestiano had a balustrade and was served by a stair]  That at St Peter’s was grandiose.  Evidence that Alberti thought specifically about the outdoor church and that he can therefore be associated – how closely must remain debatable – with these examples is to be found at Mantua.  The façade of San Sebastiano is designed with regard to the piazza before it.(fig)  Monstance and display are essential to its conception.  It is enough to ask, why five doors?  The answer involves the church’s possession of a number of relics.[18] As at Sant’ Andrea, these were to be displayed to the faithful.  But San Sebastiano, on its Greek cross plan, is not a congregational church.  San Sebastiano’s piazza is the congregational place.  Raised on its podium, the façade was eminently visible.  The loftiness of any ritual actions that look place at the level of the loggia was evident.  Staircases rose to the round-headed openings as at present, or else the three central square-headed where approached up a flight of steps – less likely if clergy were to do more than stand in their doorways, indeed were meant to pass through and forward onto an apron to expose the relics or themselves in more than a dumb-show.  It is not necessary here, however, to attempt a detailed reconstruction of Alberti’s original intentions for the church and its façade –the interpretation of the documentation and the material fabric has occupied scholars for a long time and will no doubt continue to do so.  The general character of the spectacle to which the façade was crucial may be described.  The composition adheres to the basic laws of altarpiece design (indeed, it is possible to say that the church façade in general serves as the model for the altarpiece, conceived as a place of encounter with holy personnages).  Axiality establishes the rule of hierarchical importance.  Here, the pediment that preeminently aligns with the central doorway and the window that breaks the entablature enforce the rule.  Elevation is orchestrated, with the earthly at the bottom and, above, the celestial (or, as in the case of the common motif of the Annunciation enacted across the spandrels at the top of the main panel, the antecedent).  There are three clear levels at San Sebastiano; the crypt, the loggia and the upper window.  Access is controlled.  In the case of the altarpiece, the intercession of the saints is sought and the ease with which they can perform this role is graduated according to their historical closeness to Christ and the Madonna or their importance in shaping the dogma of the Church.  The faithful before an altarpiece usually make their address first to the saints humblest, lowest and most distant from the axis.  At San Sebastiano, the doorways increase in dignity towards the axis.  The faithful would approach the hierarchy via the round-headed doorways to which niches respond in the back wall of the loggia. Or else deacons or acolytes could emerge.  The three central doors in the facade correspond with three doors giving directly into the church.  As a result, the spaces within the loggia, containing the round-headed doorways and niches, serve, as-it-were, as anti-chambers to the main route of holy progress.  The upper window’s breaking of the entablature, or else the entablature’s deferential dividing for the sake of the window increases the sense of the vitality of the axis as a route of manifestation or egress.  The drama of religious display would have arrived at a splendid climax if, at last, a person, a relic, or an actor playing saint or angel should have appeared in the upper opening.[19]  All the while, of course, the setting of a congregational space in open air before a portico behind which was a sanctuary recalls ancient Greek and Roman practice and custom.

    The façade of San Sebastiano may be usefully compared with Donatello’s altar in the church of St Anthony in Padua -the Santo Altar.  The present composition of  statues, reliefs and architectural elements is an incorrect reconstruction of what Donatello intended.  Documents list the components which would have found a place in the ensemble, and scholars have offered various suggestions.  Evidently, there was an arch over the central part of the altarpiece and otherwise the bronze saints were assembled in trabeated spaces.  Mantegna’s San Zeno Altarpiece in Verona very probably  pays homage to Donatello’s intention.  Flanking the Madonna and Child at Padua the saints were grouped three on either side.  The Madonna and Child were surely isolated under the arch and contained by columns in a narrow space.  The sacramental seriousness of the group, partly indicative of which is its closed composition, demands their exclusive occupancy of their space.  The attendant saints are more or less open in pose and communicate more of less animatedly.  Those humblest and most remote from the Madonna and Child historically and theologically –St Anthony and St Francis- and most concerned with others’ salvation before their own, should have been placed at the extremes of the figure composition, the more effectively to perform their intercessory task.  It is surely a betrayal of their lives and work that, at present, they comprise an inner triptych group with the Madonna and Child.  A relative psychological composure belongs to the martyrs, S. Justina and Daniel and the bishops, St Louis and St Prosdocimus.  The hierarchy of saints would go from confessors (Francis and Anthony) to bishops (Louis and Prosdocimus) to martyrs (Daniel and Justina).  When the altarpiece is conceived as an ascent and journey, rather than a static heavenly assembly, finding the most important saints of the place – Francis and Anthony- at the gate so-to-speak dramatizes the scene, that is, removes it from the timeless and sets within the terms of historia.  The spirit of the intercessory saints can be thought to inhabit the steps and the round-header doors at San Sebastiano, that of the loftier the platform with the three lintelled openings.

    From the piazza, high and low, axial and periferal, remote and assessible are all made clear.  These are the fundamentals of a composition that locates the pastoral in relation to the priestly, the secular in relation to the religious, the knowable in relation to the mysterious.  These same terms were implicit in the Platea Sancti Petri.  Their best and purest representation is in Alberti’s Ur-form: their most magnificent is in Sant’ Andrea; and their rudest and simplest is in Alberti’s own church of San Martino a Gangalandi. 

    These fundamentals of this theatre of piety are to be distinguished from the fundamentals of matter and design.  Arches, piers, columns, entablatures and the rest of the lexicon of classical architecture explain the absolutes of span and height.  They constitute an architecture aimed at formal perfection.  We pass through it as hushed visitors or we survey it, transfixed.  If they are material relics in our imagination, archaeology connects with history, and they may conjure up associational ideas.  But, as well as these things –and more than them- Alberti’s architecture is this theatre of piety and morality.  Its essence is that it is not uninhabited; it is not silent.  It has been shaped to accommodate and facilitate human interactions.  As such, it is witness to events.  The bench awaits sitters, the doorway expects an appearance; the platform will serve for formal intercourse.  People are to be pictured.  There will be conversations, greetings and a sacral lowering of voices.  In other words, the fundamentals of the theatre of piety apply also to the city at large, conceived as a moral conventicle. 

    There, a scene of harmonious and virtuous citizenship was to disclose itself.  The moral society required that a route pass uninterruptedly from the private house to the church.  For Alberti, a simplified and Early Christian religion could open the path, could connect the secular and religious.  Where they met was the piazza, beneath the skies the arena of public virtue, inspired by Christian example from one direction and from the other by instinctual identification of individual happiness with the happiness of our fellows.

    [1]

    [2] Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VII, 13, p.627-29. See above, Faith and Belief, n.56

    [3] Grayson, II, De iciarchia, p.273. lines 21-23

    [4] Romano,Tenenti, Furlan, III, p.265, l.2131-2134.  See also the Intercenale, ‘Servus’, in Marsh, 1987, pp.91-7

    [5] Torgil Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture, Figura 9, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1958, Appendix, p.358, sentence 144

    [6] Pius II, The Commentaries of Pius II, translation by Florence Gragg with historical  notes by Leona Gabel, Smith College Studies in History, Vol.XXXV, Northampton, Mass., 1951, p.[get]

    [7] Platina, Lives of the Popes, translated by W. Bentham, p.272

    [8] Another name associated with the project but with an equally tenuous claim to responsibility is that of Francesco del Borgo. See Charles Burroughs, From Signs to Design : environmental process and reform in early Renaissance Rome, Cambridge, Mass., London: MIT Press, 1990, p. [Get

    [9] See Op.cit., pp.20-23, note 3

    [10] Tiberio Alfarano, De Basilicae Vaticanae Antiquissima et Nova Structura, con introduzione e note dal dott. D. Michele Cerrati, Roma Vaticana, 1914, p.129

    [11] Ludwig Heydenreich, Architecture in Italy 1400-1500, Yale University Press Pelican History of Art: New Haven/London, 1974, p.59

    [12]Rykwert et al, IV,2, p.97; Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.279: ‘Caeterum locasse urbem oportet agro in medio, unde spectare in oram suam et discernere oportuna et adtemperate praesto esse quo necessitas postulet…’

    [13] Pius II, The Commentaries of Pius II, translation by Florence Gragg with historical  notes by Leona Gabel, Smith College Studies in History, Vol.XXXV, Northampton, Mass., 1951, Book VIII, pp.523-66

    [14] Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo zibaldone, I, “Il Zibaldone Quaresmale”, pagine scelte a cura do Alessandro Perosa, London: The Warburg Institute, Unioversity of London, 1960, p.69

    [15] Vasari, Milanesi, Vol.II, pp.546-47 [check].  Taken from Franco Borsi, Alberti. L’Opera Completa, Milano: Electa, 1980, p.39-40, who cites the passages in De re aedificatoria where Alberti mentions the roof on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and the desirability of such roofs generally.

    [16] Tavernor and Borsi ?[get refs]

    [17]Paul’s fear was perhaps of a repetition of a conspiracy like that of Stefano Porcari, in 1453, when it was Nicholas V who was the object.  Alberti wrote De porcaria conjuratione [check], a text that was perhaps too even-handed, first of all for Nicholas’s liking and then for Paul’s.

    [18] Richard Lamoureux, [get] or Ercolano Marani

    [19] At the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini, a platform at first floor level, as deep as the front door recess, would have been a similarly impressive place at which to display the relics of the church, which included prominently a thorn from the crown of the Passion and a fragment of the True Cross and were held in the Cella delle Reliquie beyond the first chapel of the south side.  Unfortunately, there is no evidence that there was a plan to make it accessible.[possibly too idle a speculation]