Alberti etc.

Tag: art

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 25^th 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, 2^nd 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]

July 14, 2025
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 25^th 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 22^nd 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 22^nd 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 25^th 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

July 6, 2025
6.2 Alberti Architectural Impiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ma come non si dirà tempio né basilica perfetta quella struttura a quale tetto, che cuopra chi entro al sacrificio fusse dal sole e dalle piove, e sponde mancasse, quali parte difendano da’ venti, parte la tengano segretata dagli altri siti publici e profani, e forse ancora manchandoli e’ dovuti a sé ornamenti sarebbe edificio non perfetta né assoluto, così la amicizia mai si dirà perfetta e compiuta, a quale manchi delle sue parte alcuna. Né sarà vera amicizia se fra gli amici non sarà una comune fede e ferma e semplice affezione d’animo si fatta, ch’ella escluda e fuori tenga ogni suspizione e odio, quale da parte alcuna potesse disturbare la dolce fra loro pace e unione. Né io reputerò perfetta amicizia quella quale non sia piena d’ornamenti di virtu e costume; a qual certo cose chi dubita la sola per sé benivolenza non valervi, se non quando sia e conosciuta e ricambiate?[10]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Christian use of the domestic place

Family – the building block of civilization

Domestic virtue – the base of Christian virtue

(the moral ‘little wooden hut’)

The common meal               Table

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

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

Francesco Alberti (Lirici Toscani del Quattrocento a cura di Antonio Lanza) is pretty close to Leon Battista on lots of matters. Selfish piety is the theme of his sonnet (LXI). The metaphor is commercial. Christ has left in pawn his precepts and examples with his disciples, and we may redeem them. Piety without works is damnable: L’ore sanza essercizio son perdute… (p.97, Vol.I)

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

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

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

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

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

On standing and being seated, Cena familiaris:

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

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

              maggiori, mai volle essere veduto sedere in publico presente

              messer Antonio cavaliere suo fratello e gli altri, dei quali

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

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

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

              Benedetto suo fratello consubrino per etˆ maggiore, mai fu

              veduto asedersi. E cos“ noi tutti sempre rendemmo reverenza

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

              come figliuoli. (see copy in this computer)

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

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

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

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

Sudore                       roba                            grato                           voglia

Sangue                       liberta                         ossequente                sdegno

Vita                             tranquillita                subietto                      stizza

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

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

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

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

‘There followed the practice of our own times, which I only wish some man of gravity would think fit to reform. I say this with all due respect to our bishops, who, to preserve their dignity, allow the people to see them scarcely once in the year of festivals, yet so stuff everything with altars, and even … I shall say no more. Let me simply state that within the mortal world there is nothing to be found, or even imagined, that is more noble or holy than the sacrifice. I would not consider anyone who wanted to devalue such great things, by making them too readily available, a person of good sense.’ What could be worse than an excess of altars? All I can think of is, idols. Is Alberti implying that, where the example and spirit are absent, only mumbo-jumbo can be present? As is clear from the episode involving Stupor and the other gods in Momus, Alberti was alert to the problem of idolatry. Where there was imagery, there God was emphatically absent. But the provocation to the moral imagination was most dramatically present. The faithful person, like the observer of the historia, is morally responsible. It is out of my own goodness of heart that I rejoice and weep for others. The idea that the virtu of God should exist in the material representation is, for him, ridiculous.

In Theogenius, he wrote, «Licurgus, dicono, statuì in Sparta facessero alli dii sacrifici non suntuosi nè tali che non potessero ogni dì continuarli. E a’ prudenti principi si vuol dare non cose pregiate dalle persone idiote e vulgari…»[35] This was to contradict the position that allowed Gianozzo Manetti to give the following account of Nicholas V’s motives for church-building:

            The immense, supreme authority of the Church of Rome can in the first place be understood only by those who have studied its origins and developments through the medium of the written word. But the masses of the population have no knowledge of literary matters and are without any kind of culture: and although they often hear men of learning and erudition state that the authority of the Church is supreme, and lend their faith to this assertion, reputing it to be true and indisputable, yet there is need for them to be awestruck by grandiose spectacle, lest their faith, resting as it does on weak and unstable foundation, might with the passage of time be finally reduced to naught. However, the grandeur of buildings, of monuments which are in a sense enduring and appear to testify to the handiwork of our Lord, serves to reinforce and confirm that faith of the common people which is based on the assertions of the learned, so that it is then propagated among the living and in the course of time passed on to all those who will be enabled to admire these wonderful constructions. This is the only way to uphold and extend the faith so that, preserved and increased in this way, it may be perpetuated with admirable devotion.[36]

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

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

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

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

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

[1]

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

[3]Ibid., l.25-26

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

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

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

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

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

[9] David Marsh, pp.63-64

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

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

[12] Leach, p.190

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

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

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

[16]Ibid., III,1235-1237

[17]Ibid., III, 1273-1275

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

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

[20] Ibid., l.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[28] Marsh, p.119

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[36] Paolo Portoghesi,Rome of the Renaissance, translated by Pearl Sanders, London, Phaidon, 1972, pp. 11-12 (for the English translation). Eugène Muntz, Les Arts à la Cour des Papes pendant le XVe et le XVIe siècle, Hildesheim/Zürich/New York, Georg Olms, 1983, pp. 337-338 (transcription from Ludovico Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Milan, 1734, III, 2, col. 949): «Romanae namque Ecclesiae auctoritatem maximam ac summam esse, ii soli intelligunt, qui originem et incrementa sua ex literarum cognitione perceperunt. Ceterorum vero cunctorum populorum turbae literarum ignarae, penitusque expertes, quamvis a doctis et eruditis viris, qualia, et quanta illa sunt, crebro audire, eisque tamquam veris et certis assentiri videantur, nisi tamen egregiis quibusdam visis moveantur, profecto omnis illa eorum assensio debilibus et imbecillis fundamentis innixa, diuturnitate temporis ita paulatim elabitur, ut plerumque ad nihilum recidat. At vero quum illa vulgaris opinio doctorum hominum relationibus fundata, magnis aedificiis perpetuis quodammodo monumentis, ac testimonis paene sempiternis, quasi a Deo fabricatis, in dies usque adeo corroboratur et confirmatur, ut in vivos posterosque illarum admirabilium constructionum conspectores continue traducatur; ac per hunc modum conservatur et augetur, atque sic conservata et aucta, admirabili quadam devotione conditur et capitur.» Cf. also, Torgil Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture, in «Figura», no. 9, Stockholm, Almquist & Wiskell, 1958, pp. 351-362.; Christine Smith and Josepf F. O’Connor, Buidling the Kingdom: Ginnozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona, 2006, p.482. See Carroll Westfall (In this Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447-55, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974) for discussion of Nicholas’ thinking about art and architecture and the role of Alberti in framing his plans. Manfredo Tafuri (Ricerca del Rinascimento: principi, cittá, architetti, Torino, Einaudi, 1992, Chap. 2, «Cives esse non licere. Nicolò V e Leon Battista Alberti», pp.33-88), bringing together a large quantity of more recent scholarship, draws attention to differences between the purposes and thinking of Nicholas and Alberti.

March 30, 2025
Preface

Cease. O man, cease searching into the secrets of the gods deeper than mortals are allowed.[1]

For Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), there were things that were unknowable and about which it was useless to speculate. He advocated philosophical scepticism. If knowledge of the divine is not to be had, what remains to be embraced in this world in its frames of space and time? Alberti was emphatically a student of nature and history. So, I take his advice and apply it generally. There are parts of any biographical subject that are axiomatically also beyond the reach of enquiry. I avoid presuming to know more than what Alberti said and did. Specifically, the psychological springs of his action remain unknown within the text that follows. That is not to say that there is no speculation. On the contrary; for I look precisely towards the uncertain in his life and work. But the object of speculation is his conscious action, not that impelled by mood, temperament or predisposition.

This book intends to be complementary to the scholarly literature on Alberti as architect and theorist. It attempts neither the narrative breadth nor the psychological penetration of a biography: nor is it a close study of his architecture. There already exists an extensive literature covering these themes, including recently-published monographs in English by Richard Tavernor and Anthony Grafton. Massimo Bulgarelli has lately (2008) contributed to the extensive Italian resources. Whether it is to the credit of the subject or the scholarship that he has sparked is difficult to determine: but it is a remarkable thing to be able to say that great monographs like those of Franco Borsi (1986) and –remarkably- Girolamo Mancini (1911) remain invaluable.[2] Here, the approach is through Alberti’s own writings.

Instead of looking at Alberti the biographical subject, at the architectural works that he designed or at the theory of architecture that he framed, the present work is concerned with, so-to-speak, the spaces or gaps in between. The facts of his life, the matter of his buildings and the internal connections of his architectural thought constitute the three relatively stable points in what, from our perspective, is a fluid medium of more elusive actions and meditations. Alberti’s non-architectural writings have a tenor that preconditioned and chimed with his thinking and practice of architecture. Only ostensibly peripheral to the question of his architecture, they reward closer reading. His practice of architecture itself did not always realise itself in bricks and mortar. The incomplete, the modified and the aborted call to be considered. He also adopted a role that was polemical and advisory. The architecture of others is to be looked at, where it has been shaped by Alberti’s instruction and suggestion.

Alberti is the object of a scholarly interest that still grows, to the extent that it now supports a dedicated journal, Albertiana. Among many, Stefano Borsi, in recent years, has made a considerable contribution to the scholarship concerned with Leon Battista Alberti. On the basis of his enormously extensive knowledge of primary documentary sources, going to considerable depths of interpretation and, boldly, to limits of reasoned speculation, he weaves a narrative tapestry of a closeness of texture that invites the shortest perspective.

The general reader, however, needs to view the matter from some distance and be permitted to trace more general outlines. The aim here is to identify and consider Alberti’s more important ideas. Reading across the extent of his writings in so many genres, treating so much diverse material, we find him addressing certain points again and again. His own thought, in other words, was not a set of distinct aperçus and arguments emerging uniquely from the matter to hand: rather, it was a continual attempt to express and connect ideas, both central and recurrent. He sought to establish a foundation – a set of values that we would need to cleave to if we were to play our part in a benign and productive social world. The project acknowledged the prevalent obstacles to its realization. Although Alberti was interested in all sorts of subjects, from history to cartography, from cryptography to equestrianism, his concerns were centrally and over-archingly with moral matters. So, why we live in society, how what we think relates to what we feel and how we should conduct ourselves are some of his crucial questions. He looked for answers and he stated his conclusions on them in that multitude of contexts. As a consequence, whilst the object here is the interpretation of historical material, it is not the tracing of a historical process. The story of his life and the building histories do that. What follows is without the convenient framework of chronological sequence. Some objects and texts will recur in discussions, as these several contexts are considered and as various perspectives are adopted.

Together with the scholarly attention that Alberti receives goes historiographical reflexiveness. However, for the sake of simplicity, its complications and contentions are not addressed here.

Some justification needs to be offered for the form and anatomy of this book. The one perhaps withholds the comfort of the familiar, and the other maybe belongs to a somewhat loosely-connected and ill-coordinated creature. It can seem presumptuous for a writer to require the reader to trace a wayward path to an indefinite conclusion. However, the very connectedness of Alberti’s thought makes tendentious the clarity of successiveness. The chapters link also independently of the argument implicit in their sequence. Some focus upon practical, some upon theoretical matters. Others consider his thinking about faith, morality and society. His philosophy aimed at identifying the unifying principle in Nature, Art and Society.

It is the nature of an exercise like this that investigations could always go further, that avenues open in profusion. So, here, there are themes that go disregarded, neglected and overlooked. Hares are started that others will be more fleet to pursue. That is the hope.

Of the visual arts, painting and sculpture, the subjects of two of Alberti’s treatises, could treat matters of moral concern very readily. Architecture would, as first, seem to be excluded from such a task, incapable of representation in the same direct sense as painting and sculpture. It would be glib to state that sculpture of the single figure exposes character, that the painted historia reveals the factors acting upon the caste of characters and that architecture provides the necessary spectacle to frame the drama. But Alberti did find, in architecture, the stage upon which these questions and answers could be enunciated and proposed. Set down within the architectural environment, the morally alert individual willingly obeys its injunctions.

This book considers Alberti in his own words.

[1] Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces, a translation of the Intercenales by David Marsh, Binghampton, New York, 1987, p.24. This instruction appears in ‘Fatum and Fortuna’, one of his Intercenali; short tales and fables to be recited and presumably discussed between dinner-courses. Leonis Baptistae Alberti, Opera Inedita et Pauca Separatim Impressa, curante Hieronymo Mancini, Florentiae, J.C. Sansoni, 1890, p. 137: ‘…desine, inquiunt, homo, istiusmodi dei deorum occulta investigare longius quam mortalibus liceat…’[Get check]

[2] Richard Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1998; Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance, Penguin, 2002; Massimo Bulgarelli, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72): Architettura e Storia, Electa: Milano, 2008; Franco Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti: L’Opera Completa, Electa: Milano, 1980; Girolamo Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, Bardi Editore: Roma, 1971 (Reprint of 1911Edition)

December 3, 2024