Alberti etc.

Tag: italy

  • 12. Porticoes and Piazzas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [16] Tavernor and Borsi ?[get refs]

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

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

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

  • 10. Alberti and Florence Cathedral

    Alberti can be thought of as having a shadow presence in buildings for which he was not directly responsible.  He was on occasion advisor, inspiration or philosophical scene-setter.  At the same time, there was a building, for which he had no responsibility, but that he, so-to-speak, haunted, and that held a crucially important place in his thought and imagination.  It figures several times in Alberti’s writings.  He encountered it repeatedly, and he adopted a number of distinct perspectives upon it.  These extended beyond the material, technical, formal and practical, to the spiritual.  Florence Cathedral provoked moral and imaginative ruminations.  He has left three or perhaps four documents that allow a reconstruction of something of his rich and complex response to the building.  There are also some other documents behind which seem to hover recollections of the building.  As well as an emblematic building for Alberti, Florence Cathedral can serve as a case study, for the kinds of thought that it prompted reveal the richness of his approach to architecture in general.

    Of course, it should be remembered that what Alberti looked at in the mid 1430s demanded a prominent place in the mind of any witness.  Its claim was self-evidently to be the greatest building in the world: loftier than Hagia Sophia, its dome of a greater span than the Pantheon’s.  The cupola set at such a giddy height, it could have prompted the statement made a century later about the ambition of the New St Peter’s project –that the Pantheon would be built atop the Basilica of Maxentius.[1]

    The first text to be considered focuses upon the building as a technical and practical exercise  The dome of the Cathedral features in De reaedificatoria.  Or rather, the present suggestion that it does so is predicated upon a particular reading of the treatise where, in Book III, Chapter 14, Alberti discusses domes. 

    Early in his treatment of the subject, he inserts a joke.  Domes can be celestial or speluncular.  They can be heavenly or infernal evocations: ‘Neque me praeterit Ennium poetam maximas coeli appellasse formices, et Servium cavernas dixisse eas esse…’.[2]  Perhaps there is to be a wry smile at the thought that they are also devilishly difficult to describe; for he warns the reader that the terminology needs to be simplified and that he will be coining terms: ‘Fingenda mihi erunt nomina, quo sim, quem esse me his libris maxime elaborandum institui, facilis et minime obscurus.’[3]  First, he explains that there are three basic types of dome: fornix, camura and recta spherica.  The Cathedral’s dome is not one of these types.  Orlandi-Portoghesi translates the terms as, a botte, a crociera and sferiche.[4]  The expressions are well-chosen, for Alberti defines them very effectively in terms predominantly of mathematical locus: the first is a curved beam produced along a straight line, the second –groin vault– is the intersection at right angles of two barrel vaults, and the third is, in effect, the revolution of an arch about an axis passing vertically through its apex.

    Alberti then goes on to mutations of these pure forms.  The question to be debated is whether the Cathedral dome is one of those.  He describes first the semi-dome, produced by slicing a spherical dome vertically through its apex.  It can buttress or extend spaces.  Continuing the slicing procedure, there is then the sail dome (turgidi veli similitudine velam).  It is a spherical vault (recta spherica) with four vertical slices removed.  This is otherwise identified as the dome on merging pendentives.  It can be pictured in the loggia of Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital and the side aisle bays of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito.  Alberti is repeating the action that produced the semi-dome, except that the cuts are shifted away from the axis.

    At this point, Alberti goes on to describe the sphericam angularem.  It results from repeating the action that produced the sail dome for a six-sided or eight-sided figure: ‘In qua vero perficiunda plures fornicis partes conveniant, quales videmus sex octove angulorum areas testudinari, hanc nos sphericam angularem appellabimus.’[5] Orlandi-Portoghesi construes the description as that of a dome like the Old Sacristy’s.[6] The more sides to the polygon, the shorter the spans of the arches running round the circumference and the greater the difference in height between their apices and that of the whole vault.  Alberti describes the vault as consisting of fornices.  Groins of a prominence proportional to the number of sides of the polygon run across the vault from the springings of these arches.  Brunelleschi made twelve vertical slices in his domes of the Old Sacristy and the Pazzi Chapel.  If described in terms of locus, this dome would be the product of the intersection of six or eight curved beams produced over an arc.

    However, despite the geometric consequence of the procedure of setting the recta spherica on a figure of more than four sides, it is not entirely certain that Alberti is conceiving the pumpkin home here.  There are two difficulties with the interpretation.  One is that it depends upon a somewhat cavalier reading of the word fornix – barrel vault.  It is a difficult passage.  To repeat: ‘In qua vero perficiunda plures fornicis partes conveniant, quales videmus sex octove angulorum areas testudinari, hanc nos sphericam angularem appellabimus.’  Another way of describing a pumpkin dome could be as a circuit of arches produced across an arc and diminishing in width to nothing at the apogee.  Though the liths (as of an orange) conceived in this way have something in common with them, they are not really barrel vaults.  Perhaps a passage of text has been removed here.  The qua, now refers grammatically to the ‘testudinem … quam nos turgidi veli similitudine velam nuncupabimus.’  But the structure as described consists of barrel vaults conjoining in some way, not the sail vault.  Of course, it is possible, as well as that a passage is missing here, that Alberti was not clear in thinking or expression. 

    Having next explained that vault-building requires centerings, Alberti observes that neverthless the recta spherica can be built without centering.  The vault can be stable through the process of construction because each voussoir serves also as a keystone, or locking element.  A voussoir in the vertical plane is simultaneously a keystone in the horizontal plane.[7]  The principle can be understood by looking at Giuliano da Sangallo’s drawing.[fig.]  The ‘volte tonde di mezzane quali si voltano a Firenze senza armadura’ includes Alberti’s principle in the spiralling herringbone brickwork; for each brick placed as a header acts as a keystone, together with stretches of masonry forming webs, between the spiralling ribs, in which the bricks act as simple voussoirs.  However, Alberti goes on to say that it is possible to build also the angularem sphericam without centering: ‘Angularem quoque testudinem sphericam, modo per eius istius crassitudinem rectam sphericam interstruas, poteris attollere nullis armamentis.’[8]  This is the second difficulty.  Now, whilst it is conceivable that the dome on merging pendentives can be built without centering, the pumpkin or rib-and-sails vault cannot, for the ribs or groins in this form of vault are given an extra burden, in the form of the sails springing from them. 

    There is also another way of conceiving an intersection of barrel vaults (‘plures fornicis partes conveniant’).  Since the dome of Florence Cathedral is not of the pumpkin type, it could best be described as a mutation of the groin vault.  A pointed arch, produced, would be a pointed tunnel vault.  The intersection of two at right angles creates a pointed groin vault.  If a further two pointed tunnel vaults were to pass through on the diagonals, further groins would be created.  While the vaults (as opposed to the groins) are borne in mind, the picture, at this point, is of something resembling the dome with ribs and sails.  The difference is that the groins are rising to the level of the ridge of the tunnel vaults, whereas in the vault that Orlandi-Portoghesi conceives, these ridges are forming arches.  However, another way of thinking is to abstract the geometry of the groins, and make it the geometric formwork of a dome, stretching infilling material across it.  In effect, the groins are turned inside out, and become the edges of curved planes of the vault.  Each of its surfaces, as with the groin vault, curves in only one plane.  They are straight-lined in the other plane.  The term sphericam angularem would serve well to describe this sort of dome. Such a dome can be built without centering.  The proof is the dome of Florence Cathedral, famously built without centering.

    How many examples of this dome type constructed in this way can Alberti have seen?  As well as an object, the dome of Florence Cathedral was an achievement.  The appearance of the type in De re aedificatoria was, surely, the revelation, in practice, of a single exemplary case.  The difficulties that had stood in the way of its realisation had been immense.  Alberti, in recognition of them, noted, in his Prologue to Della pittura, that the impossible seemed to have been undone in Brunelleschi’s solution: ‘..quale arteficio [the dome] certo, se io ben iudico, come a questi tempi era incredibile potersi, così forse appresso gli antichi fu non saputo né conosciuto?’[9] 

    There had been a drum raised in obedience to the rule established by those who had first conceived the dome: it guaranteed that the dome constructed according to the system of the ‘pointed fifth’ would reach a height two times its span.  The increase of the span from 62 braccia to 72 in the middle of the 1360s meant a corresponding increase in the height of the vault.  However, that increase could not take up the whole 20 braccia.  The drum filled out the difference.  Rising well above the levels of the nave and of the tribunes, it was unbuttressed.  Adding to the difficulties was the octagonal plan of the structure.  A long span passed from the points of the figure and a short from side to side.  In elevation, the loads received at the wall-head were similarly inconstant.  On the long diagonal the material of the vault would exert a greater lateral thrust than on the short, and the shere mass of material was greater on the long spans than the short.  There was an absolute need to deal with thrusts that, upon the octagon at the level of the springing, were impossible to compute.  The solution could not involve the buttressing of the drum.  Brunelleschi’s solution also solved the other main problem of the project: the impossibility of creating a timber centering (because of the size of such a structure and the cost of the timber itself).  By means of tie rings and compression rings, thrusts could be neutralised and the dome, thoughout the process of construction, converted to dead weight, bearing only vertically.  By these means too, the structure could rise without centering.  As Alberti wrote, ‘Chi mai si duro o si invido non lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo qui struttura si grande, erta sopre e’ cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti e’ popoli toscani, fatta sanza alcuno aiuto di travamenti o di copia di legname…’[10]  It was a testitudo angularis in being able to rise in this way.  The most famous local example of such a dome was over the Baptistry.

    The achievement was also more than technical, for Alberti considered the methodological resources out of which Brunelleschi fashioned it.  Whereas the ancient Roman dome builders belonged within an artisan or theoretical tradition that was able to address such problems (as, Alberti no doubt thought, the Pantheon exemplified), Brunelleschi could call upon no such parentage, for the thread had been broken by a Dark Age.[11] He invented the solution out of his own resources.  Artisan tradition, in 1420, had been unable to solve the problem of the dome.  Instead, an individual is credited with having done so.  The individual had done what neither contemporaries nor the ancient Romans could do.  The achievement was historic.

    The dome of Florence Cathedral stood, for Alberti, as a moment, attesting something about individual human creativity.  It is possible to say that Man is redefined in the prologue to Della pittura.  And it is more than a rhetorical trope; Alberti is not making the claim merely artfully.

    The Prologue’s praise of Brunelleschi and of the other most distinguished artists of the immediately preceding period -Donatello, Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia and Masaccio- is set within an argument of huge compass.  Alberti had it that their achievements gave the lie to a belief that he had had, namely that Nature –and history– was menopausal.  Her fecund life –he had thought– was over: ‘…la natura, maestra delle cose, fatta antica e stracca, più non producea come né giuganti così né ingegni, quali in que’ suoi quasi giovanili e più gloriosi tempi produsse, amplissimi e maravigliosi.’[12] The world had only infertility and senescence as its future.  But he was wrong.  The evidence of the state of the visual arts in Florence was that she was indeed even in the flower of her young adulthood.  The dome, as a challenge and an achievement, was a sign of life; and the life that it announced was an example for all to take.  The church was inhabited by a fecund spirit, at some level to be identified with its dedicatee, Santa Maria del Fiore.

    The topos that shaped the Prologue to Della pittura is a rich one, for it contains within itself the whole notion of rebirth, or renaissance.  Nature had been fecund; she then passed into an infertile condition; and now she was productive again.  It was a rebirth of fertility itself that Alberti charted.  In addition, it was germinated in the will of the artists themselves: ‘…nostra industria e diligenza.’[13]

    It is tempting to suggest that, as he worked on the translation of his Latin treatise on painting into Italian (an order of events, confessedly, to be argued) a drama that he had only just witnessed inspired him to think in the metaphorical terms of a regained fecundity.  The notion is encouraged by an oddness in the prologue to Della pittura.  The subject of the treatise does not prima facie connect with an achievement in architecture.  Yet the dome very much belongs in the prologue itself, where the theme is the general efflorescence of the visual arts in Florence.  The event was one that took place in Spring of that year and focussed ideas of the new season, the historic feat and the presiding spirit of the now-pregnant Virgin Mary.  There is reason to think that, for Alberti, the dome was an emblem.

    On 25th March 1436, Pope Eugenius IV made his way from his lodgings at Santa Maria Novella to Santa Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral, to officiate at the service of consecration of the newly-completed dome.  It was Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation.  Brunelleschi had prepared a timber walkway raised two braccia – about four feet– above the ground for the pontiff’s passage from the one church to the other.  The pope and his retinue must have levitated their way to their destination from the perspective of all but the first rank of onlookers. Brunelleschi’s achievement –completing the construction so quickly, for the pope had given short notice of his intentions– might have seemed to rival Julius Caesar’s in marching his timber bridge across the Rhine.  The service, in the Cathedral, was the occasion of the singing by the choir of the motel in four parts, Nuper Rosarum Flores, specially composed by Guillaume Dufay.  It told of the end of winter and the arrival of spring, of the Madonna, of the Flower.  There, was the polyphonic experience.  The season itself could not but enter the Cathedral.

    Thoughts about the Cathedral in connection with spring –indeed, identification of the Cathedral with spring– recurred to Alberti as he was writing the dialogue, Profugiorum ab aerumna a few years later.  Angolo Pandolfini is given the speech, that has been used above where Alberti’s Faith and Belief were the subject, in praise of Santa Maria del Fiore:

    And certainly this temple has in itself grace and majesty; and, as I have often thought, I delight to see joined together here a charming slenderness with a robust and full solidity so that, on the one hand, each of its parts seems designed for pleasure, while, on the other, one understands that it has all been built for perpetuity.  I would add that here is the constant home of temperateness, as of springtime: outside, wind, ice and frost; here inside one is protected from the wind, here mild air and quiet.  Outside, the heat of summer and autumn; inside, coolness.  And if, as they say, delight is felt when our senses perceive what, and how much, they require by nature, who could hesitate to call the temple the nest of delights?  Here, wherever you look, you see the expression of happiness and gaiety; here it is always fragrant; and, that which I prize above all, here you listen to the voices during mass, during that which the ancients called the mysteries, with their marvelous beauty.[14]

    The structure of the passage –indeed of the argument– is very revealing and eloquent.  It opens with an assertion that seems absurd, for the church is credited with possessing antithetical qualities –grace and majesty.[15]  Grace implies fluid movement, the lightest of treads.  Majesty is static, weighty and impassive.  How can the building have both?  As will be seen, however, Alberti is neither sloppy nor rhetorically dishonest in proposing a resolution of opposites.  He continues by elaborating the thought and by, as it were, creating two lists of antithetical epithets for the church.  He finds, corresponding with grace, a charming slenderness, and a source of pleasure.  At the same time, the majestic structure is robust and stable, and assures him of its durability.  He would propose the same meeting of opposed qualities when he described the church of Sant’ Andrea that he would design for Lodovico Gonzaga at lieto and eterno.[16]

    The cathedral, then, contains opposites.  However, the building is not an architectural contradiction in terms.  In fact, Alberti has it achieving what his contemporary, the mathematician, philosopher and cleric, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), sought; a meeting or reconciliation of opposites.  Cusanus was fascinated and inspired by the thought of there being points where opposition –the principle of strife– was undone; where paradox or dichotomy were somehow resolved.[17]  The quest for them might be in the realms of speculative philosophy, mathematics or moral affairs. [Get eg]  Where they would be found –where strife would be overturned– the opposite principle, that of love, would be manifest.

    In Alberti’s passage, it turns out that architecture can be a meeting of opposites.  Having carefully elaborated the duality by listing the characteristics of the building under each heading, he presents the presiding and reconciling characteristic of the place.  It is the ‘constant home of temperateness’.  In Winter, the Cathedral is warm, and in Summer, cool.  That is the nature of Spring; and the Cathedral is explicitly equated with the Spring, which within its walls and beneath its roof becomes perpetual.  Spring itself is a meeting of opposites, right at the heart of Nature.

    If the reader will go along with Alberti’s argument, the absurdity of his first assertion must fall away.  Within temperateness  –or the word for its aesthetic equivalent in architecture­– there is no contradiction between grace and majesty.  The task of architecture is precisely to represent that meeting or reconciliation of grace and majesty, slenderness and stability, pleasure and durée (the moment and eternity).  Outside, the seasons may turn, but temperateness prevails within.

    He continues the passage by conjuring the sensational aspects of Spring.  The fragrancy is that of the flowers: delighting the ear is the song of the birds. There is perhaps here a recollection of the Song of Solomon, 2:

    11 For, lo, the winter is past,/the rain is over and gone;/12 the flowers appear on the earth;/the time of the singing of birds is come,/and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;/13 the fig tree putteth forth her green figs,/and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

    The incense and choral music of the church evoked both.  Involving just such a bombardment of the senses of sight, smell and hearing –the sensations of the Spring– was that service of consecration of the dome on Lady Day, 1436.

    When these sensory delights are gathered together, they can also be seen to characterise a certain kind of painting, and it is impossible to doubt that Alberti responded to its promptings.  Just as the Cathedral was a synaesthetic trigger, so, perhaps a little surprisingly for our understanding of Alberti, was the painting of the International Gothic.   The rationalist core of De pictura and the mention of Masaccio in the prologue to Della Pittura can make it seem that Alberti was partisan as a critic of painting, and favoured what could be called the ‘severe’ school of early fifteenth-century painting.   The treatise is also a compendium of references to painting gleaned from ancient literature, to the extent that it can seem that Alberti had a classical revival exclusively in mind.  However, this would be to take an unbalanced view.  If painting addressed human reason, it also engaged the senses.  That is the implication that can be taken from a passage in Book Two which repeatedly notes painting’s peculiar ability to appeal to the learned and the unlearned.[18]  Conventional belief at the time was that the unlearned took pleasure in sensation rather than meaning.  Where he discusses pleasure in variety and copiousness in painting, Alberti makes analogies with these qualities in music and cuisine.[19]  He also enjoys them in colour.[20]  A readiness to see, hear and savour in the same terms indicates that a sense is accompanied by similar imagined exercises of the other organs of sense.   A particularly good example of a type of painting that speaks the same language of delight as the Cathedral is Gentile da Fabriano’s Madonna and Child with Saints Nicholas and Catherine, in the Staatlich Museen, Berlin.[fig]  The Madonna’s throne is set up in the meadow in which the flowers bloom profusely and, without doubt, perfume the scene.  It is ambiguously the song of birds and the music of angels that is to be heard, for orchestras of angels inhabit the two trees that gently divide the picture plane to echo the form of a triptych.

    Spring is architecture’s metaphor or emblem in Alberti’s thinking.  Agnolo’s passage may be read as an amplification upon a point made, more prosaically, in the prologue to De re aedificatoria.  It is a key function of architecture that it moderates the elemental extremes.  Alberti rejects the familiar arguments that water or fire  –the oasis or the hearth– were the first causes of us coming together into society.  He is probably thinking of the elements seasonally: in Winter, there is too much of the one and in Summer, too much of the latter.  Spring and Autumn are the seasons analogous with the more comfortable condition that architecture provides.  ‘Sed ne architecto ea re solum debemus, quod tuta optataque diffugia contra solis ardores brumam pruinasque dederit…’.[21] The action of all architecture in the theoretical text is shown in specifics in his account of the Cathedral.  At the same time, the Cathedral becomes reciprocally an epitome.  What emerges, when the two texts are put together, is a pointer to Alberti’s conception of architecture at a fundamental level.  It operates at the level of poetical analogy, where philosophical dialectic is resolved and where the moral equates with the beautiful.  All architecture aspires to the quality of Spring, the season when human beings are comfortable in the world, the one contrasting with those that, oddly, they cannot survive without artificial aids.  Thermal mass, illumination and ventilation may be the practical means to achieve it prosaically.  By climatological analogy, however, it becomes a poetic effect.  Happiness itself is a springtime of the soul.  The achievement of the dome –the occasion of the gathering of the voices– was, of course, the final exclusion of the elemental extremes.  It had to be implicated in Spring itself by reason of its function and its moment.  The church announces the undoing of the Fall itself, as do so many paintings of the Madonna and Child in an Edenic garden.

    The Cathedral with the dome was an object, an achievement, an emblem, an epitome and an experience of a richness equating with that of Nature herself.  It was also a theatre in which could be acted out Man’s truly virtuous human relations.

    Alberti arranged for it to serve such a function, when he organised the Certame Coronario.  It was a poetry competition that took place inside the church, more specifically, beneath the dome, on 22nd October 1441.  The contestants were to compose lines on the subject of amicizia –that reconciliation of difference that, in human affairs, corresponded with the meeting of opposites that Cusanus had made the object of his quest.  Alberti himself wrote a poem:

    ‘Dite, o mortali, che sì fulgente corona

    poneste in mezo, che pur mirando volete?

    Forse l’amicitia, qual col celeste Tonante

    tra li celicoli è con maiestate locata,

    ma pur sollicita non raro scende l’olimpo

    sol se subsidio darci, se comodo possa,

    non vien nota mai, non vien composta temendo

    l’invidi contra lei scelerata gente nimica.

    In tempo et luogo veggo che grato sarebbe

    a chi qui mira manifesto poterla vedere,

    s’oggi scendesse qui dentro accolta vedreste

    sì la sua effigie et gesti, sì tutta la forma.

    Dunque voi che qui venerate su’ alma corona

    leggete i miei monimenti et presto saravvi

    l’inclita forma sua molto notissima, donde

    cauti amerete.  Così sarete beati’.[22]

    ‘Tell us, O mortals, with this shining crown set in our midst, what for its praiseworthiness do you wish to possess?  Perhaps Friendship, placed in majesty with the heavenly thunderer among his angels, though frequently invoked, comes down from Olympus readily if She has succour to bring us, if She can do so obligingly; [but] never makes herself known, never reveals herself fully, while in fear of the envy against her of wicked and hostile humankind.  In time and space I see how welcome it would be to this admiring assembly to be able to see her, if today she should descend right here, received among us, both her image and her actions, indeed her complete form.  So, you who venerate her spiritual crown, read my injunctions and soon her glorious form will be fully before you, wherefore you will love [?] in all proper measure.  In this way you will be blessed.’ [23]

    Alberti’s argument is that the reception of the gift of friendship is dependent upon our preparations –our rejection of envy and wickedness.  The poem was surely recited with gestures made to the golden crown that was to be the victor’s prize and to the dome above –the image of heaven where Jupiter dwelt and the realm from which amicizia would descend, bringing harmony to the assembly and to the world.  In other words, Alberti invited the audience or congregation to understand the theme by reference to the built fabric about them.

    Amicizia was analogous with Spring and with the building that retains temperateness irrespective of the weather outside.  In the preface to Book IV of De familia, Alberti describes the visit of Buto, an old family retainer.  His gift of a few choice fruits provokes a discussion of friendship.  Its characteristic is that it was constant, and unchanged by changing circumstances.  Fortune might change; but friendship did not: ‘…essere dunque vero amico costui a chi qual sia commutazion di fortuna puo mai distorre o minuire la impresa benivolenza…’[24] Fortune is to human affairs what weather is to natural conditions.  The idea of friendship as a kind of refuge from the inconstancy and assaults of the world is expressed by Adovardo: ‘Vidi quanto alletava darci a qualunque lodati e buoni, quasi come refuggio e porto, dove truovino fedel consiglio, pronta opera, presto aiuto, e in ogni loro cosa diligente cura, molto e assiduo officio.’[25] Conducting himself in this way, the good man has a model in certain of the saints and perhaps especially in the intercessory Madonna.  The Cathedral, as described by Agnolo, has a sort of ghostly presence in this discussion.

    The temple or basilica, and amicizia are compared in specific terms by Adovardo.  An important similarity is the ability of both to exclude disharmonious elements:

    Ma come non si dirà tempio né basilica perfetta quella struttura a quale tetto, che cuopra chi entro al sacrificio fusse dal sole e dalle piove, e sponde mancasse, quali parte difendano da’ venti, parte la tengano segretata dagli altri siti publici e profani, e forse ancora manchandoli e’ dovuti a sé ornamenti sarebbe edificio non perfetta né assoluto, così la amicizia mai si dirà perfetta e compiuta, a quale manchi delle sue parte alcuna. Né sarà vera amicizia se fra gli amici non sarà una comune fede e ferma e semplice affezione d’animo si fatta, ch’ella escluda e fuori tenga ogni suspizione e odio, quale da parte alcuna potesse disturbare la dolce fra loro pace e unione. Né io reputerò perfetta amicizia quella quale non sia piena d’ornamenti di virtu e costume; a qual certo cose chi dubita la sola per sé benivolenza non valervi, se non quando sia e conosciuta e ricambiate?[26]

    Sun, rain and wind prevail only outside the church as do distrust and disaffection where people are not bound in friendship.  Constancy and fellow-feeling sustain friendship.  The temple, keeping out the elements, is itself capable of moral conduct and of cloistering those sentiments.  It houses religious observance; it sets up barriers against profanity, and it expresses its functions.  Adovardo’s speech would not have been out of place in the Cathedral on the occasion of the Certame Coronario.  Indeed, the thought is one to pause over.  The passage does read like an interpolation.  It does not really continue the argument being developed at that point in the text, which was that benevolence and amicizia are not to be equated.  What is missing from goodwill, he says, is reciprocity, the point to which he immediately returns after the short digression likening the church to amicizia.  The attractive though unverifiable thought is that it was taken from Alberti’s speech on 22nd October 1441.  In that case, the parallel between the necessary courtesies of friendship, and the ornaments whereby the church defined itself functionally and morally –products of the labours of Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello and Luca della Robbia– would make for fine theatre. And, recalling the prologue to Della pittura, it is a pity that Masaccio had not worked there.  His work was to be seen at the other end of the raised walkway taken by the pope in that Lady Day: in Santa Maria Novella was the Trinity Fresco.

    A recollection of the occasion –the vault, the artistic enrichment of the scene, the music and the season– perhaps informed in parts a passage composed to very different literary purpose in Momus.  Mortals are preparing a great spectacle by which to placate the gods:

    I shall pass over the innumerable crowd of musicians, stage performers and poets who flowed in from the provinces and all over the world.  Whatever worthy things there were among the nations were brought together to beautify the temples, the sacrifices and the games.  I won’t mention the rest, but I cannot pass over the vast project of swathing the top and sides of the theatre and the Circus Maximus in enormous gold-embroidered veils, an unbelievably massive job.  In places of honor stood statues of the great gods, all shining with gold and jewels.  But what surpassed the gold and gems in beauty, as much as they themselves were surpassed in value, were the flowers: the flowers strewn over the statues, adding to their charm; the flowers woven into garlands, girdling the statues and perfuming them with delicious incense.  Paintings, too, alabaster tables and various miraculous mirrors were added, filling men not only with admiration, but also with dumfounded amazement.[27]

    Perhaps Alberti enriches the remembered scene with the fantasy that his own perspective tricks, referred to in De Pictura, were on display.

    A later passage in Adovardo’s speech in Book IV of De familia rises to a level of eloquence that is unusual for the text as a whole and makes use of language to which the audience to Alberti’s poem would be attuned:

    E non dubitate che la virtù, cosa divina e santissima quale perpetuo sta illustre con molto lume e splendore di lode e fama in chi la sia certo adornerà quella ottima vostra amicizia, qual per sé nata e con constanza affermata, tra voi sarà poi eterna e molto iocundissima.[28] 

    To have lasting joy is to be blessed.  Agnolo Pandolfini’s Cathedral is not unlike.  It does seem possible that Alberti’s speech is to be reconstructed in part from Adovardo’s passage from lines 1470 [p.377] and 1608 [p.382] in the edition of Romano, Tenenti and Furlan.  The point is made the stronger by the fact that, eventually, Adovardo returns to the theme of the simile of amicizia and the sacred building: ‘Sarà, dico adunque, amicizia quella grandissima, a quale tu piú nulla vi desideri; ché non si direbbe perfetta, se cose ivi necessarie potesse agiungerli.’[29] This state of completeness corresponds very neatly with the property whereby things of nature and architecture can suffer no modification without damage: ‘Nos tamen brevitatis gratia sic deffiniemus: ut sit pulchritudo quidem certa cum ratione concinnitas universarum partium in eo, cuius sint, ita aut addi aut diminui aut immutari possit nihil quin improbabilius reddatur.’[30]

    Amicizia’s kinship with the Virgin and with Primavera in Alberti’s thinking is evident –the locus of this bonding, the church itself.  Here, all is moralised.  And it becomes clear, from the case of Florence Cathedral, that architecture for Alberti had a legible moral character and action.  That is, Alberti’s thinking about architecture set its moral nature prominently, in a way that later and modern thinking has tended to overlook.

    The audience at the Certame Coronario was invited to look up into the dome and acknowledge congregationally the arrival of amicizia.  It was to be an embrace of good fellowship that they would receive.  Now, this embrace was an act of a material kind.  There was a masonry dome above the witnesses’ heads.  Brunelleschi had built it.  In the Prologue to Della pittura, Alberti had pointed to the architect’s embrace of the congregation.  The dome was a ‘… struttura si grande, erta sopre e’ cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti e’ popoli toscani.’  Thanks to Brunelleschi’s act in gathering the people, like Moses or like the Madonna della Misericordia, amicizia could be manifest.  Finally, architecture was a moral art.  The Cathedral was its epitome. And the female principle of shelter and succour which had belonged to building since earliest time, as we saw above in The Candid Place 2, continued to preside there.

    On the occasion of the Certame Coronario, Alberti observed a gathering of people bound in a temperament the very reverse of one he had conceived on an earlier occasion before or within Florence Cathedral.  In the prologue to Della pittura he wrote, ‘Chi mai sì duro o sì invido non lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo qui struttura sì grande…?’  –‘Who could ever be so hard or envious that he could withhold praise…’  Uninspired by the dome, that person is hard, envious and silent.  Temperamentally, he is melancholic, and envy is the melancholic’s vice.  His season is winter, cold and dry.  By contrast, the congregation attending the poetry contest and listening to Alberti’s poem look up in praise, not down in envy, and see the light, not darkness.  They are not dry-cold, but hot-moist, not in a wintery mood but with the joy of spring.  They gather sociably, unified in a sanguine temperament.

    Alberti was at the service of 25.3.36.  Description of attendant musicians: P. Weiss, Music in the Western World, NY, 1984. p.81

    [1][1]Pantheon atop Basilica of Maxentius –[get

    [2] Orlandi, L’Architettura, III, 14, p.241.  Discussion  here best concentrates upon the Latin.

    [3] ibid.

    [4] ibid.

    [5]Op.cit., p.243

    [6] Op.cit., p.242-43, note 1

    [7] Op.cit., p.245-46: ‘Est tamen inter testudines una omnium recta spherica, quae armamenta non postulet, quando ea quidem non ex arcubus solum constat, verum etiam coronis.  Et quis possit referre aut meditari animo, quam sint horum uterque innumerabiles herentes adacti sese mutuo intersecantes ad pares angulos et ad impares, ut quotocunque loco per universarum testidinem istiusmodi aliquem interserueris lapidem, plurimorum intelligas te et arcuum et coronarum cuneum apposuisse?  Et coronam qui coronae superastruxerit, et in arcum qui alterum arcum perduxerit, fingito velle id opus labescere, unde incipiet? Cunctis praesertim cuneis unicum centrum petentibus pari et viribus et innixtu.’

    [8] Op.cit., p.247

    [9] Grayson, III, Della pittura, p.8

    [10] Ibid.

    [11] Op.cit., p.7: ‘Confessoti sì a quegli antiqui, avendo quale aveano copia da chi imparare e imitarli, meno era difficile salire in cognizione di quelle supreme arte quali oggi a noi sono faticossissime.’

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

    [13] Ibid.

    [14]C. Smith, 1992, pp.5-6: ‘E certo questo tempio ha in sè grazia e maiestà: e quello ch’io spesso considerai, mi diletta ch’io veggo in questo tempio iunto insieme una gracilità vezzosa con una sodezza robusta e piena, tale che da una parte ogni suo membro pare posto ad amenità, e dall’altra parte compreendo che ogni cosa qui è fatta e offirmata a perpetuità.  Aggiugni che qui abita continuo la temperie, si può dire, della primavera; fuori vento, gelo, brina; qui entro socchiuso da’venti, qui tiepido aere e quiéto: fuori vampe estive e autunnali; qui entro temperatissimo refigerio.  E s’egli’è, come è dicono che le delizie sono quando a’nostri sensi aggiungono le cose quanto e quali le richiede la natura, chi dubiterà appellare questo tempio nido delle delizie?  Qui dovunque tu miri, vedi ogni parte esposte a giocondità e letizia; qui sempre odoratissimo; e, quel ch’io sopra tutto stimo, qui senti in queste voci al sacrificio, e in questi quali gli antichi chiamano misteri, una soavità maravigliosa.’ Grayson, II, p.107. Smith discusses this passage extensively in the light of rhetorical models (pp.80-97).  She is interested principally in its aesthetic content, whereas the present paper is mainly interested in its moral content and its particular imagery.

    [15] Alberti conceived the temple as possessing these qualities in De re aedificatoria, VII,3.  It should perplex the admiring visitor, so that he cannot decide whether it is more laudible for the skill of its execution or for the fastidiousness of the citizenry in wanting to create such a spectacle, ‘eademque ad gratiamne magis decoremque an ad aeternitatis perpetuitatem faciant.’ (Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.545)  Interestingly, Poliziano, in the dedication of the printed edition to Lorenzo de’Medici debated the quality of Alberti’s writing style: was it more to be considered dignified or refined –‘utrum gravior ill sermo fuerit an urbanior.’  Op.cit., p.3.  Maestà would  serve as translation for the one term and grazia for the other.

    [16] See above, The Candid Place 1, note 30

    [17] Nicholas of Cusa [get ref.]

    [18] See Grayson, III, De pictura/Della pittura, para.28, pp. 50-52

    [19] Op.cit., para 40, pp.68-71

    [20] Op.cit., para 46, pp.80-83

    [21] Orlandi, L’Architettura, Prologue, p.9

    [22] Girolamo (Hieronymo) Mancini, Opera inedita et pauca separatim impressa, Florentiae: Sansoni, 1980, pp.236-37; see also Opere Volgari a cura di Cecil Grayson, Vol.II, p.45.  The differences are very minor.  Grayson concludes ‘poi cosi starete beati.’

    [23] In conjuring the image of a traffic between heaven and earth, Alberti is perhaps evoking an identification of the cathedral with a place of great significance in the Old Testament.  The identification was made on 25th March 1436 when Dufay’s motet, Nuper Rosarum Flores, was set upon the cantus firmus, ‘Terribilis est locus iste.’  These words are Jacob’s when he awakes from his dream of the angels going up and down the ladder to heaven.  He concludes that the place where he has slept is ‘none other but the house of God and … the gate of heaven (Genesis: 28,17).

    [24] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.321, l.12-14

    [25] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.361, l.1058-62

    [26] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, pp.177-78,  l.1484-1497

    [27] Knight and Brown, Momus, Book III. p.263

    [28] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, pp.381-82, l.1596-1600

    [29] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.383, l.1647

    [30] Orlandi, L’Architettura, VI, 2, p.447

  • 8 The Candid Place: a religious and secular social ideal

    [A theme to add in: the vigilance of the owner makes the villa productive.  See lecture in Renaissance Villa.  See also Matteo Palmieri (Prosatori volgari, p.384) who also cites the wise saws of forefathers.  The eye of the owner feeds the horse. ]

    The second aspect of Alberti’s disaffection with religion was a matter of faith.  His scepticism left a reduced ambit for specifically religious observance.  Moral life was found to thrive or wither on either side of the divide between religion and secularism. 

    Alberti’s response to this state of things included giving secular space a kind of reverential character, putting the religious on public display and creating religious architecture out of non-architectural elements.  The response looks in all cases to visibility as the solution of the problem.  The first of these actions seeks a set of virtues that belong equally in the religious and the secular context.  Where the light enters, candour prevails, and morality and social harmony flourish.  Alberti returned repeatedly to the task of representing such a state of things.

    A prominent theme in Renaissance architectural historiography has been the central plan.  It has been connected with mysticism in the period, and rationalism; [2] it has been seen as a metaphorical image of God, and of Man.[3]  The dome that covers it could hallow and ennoble its human occupant, or it could be read as the promise that the soul of man would be freed on the Final Day of the burden of its mortal companion.  It could mark a spot – perhaps celebrate an occasion where God was in direct contact with the world – or it could serve as a rarified symbol, pointing to things beyond place and time.[4]

    Such variety of interpretation of the central plan is not as contradictory as it would be in other contexts, for the central plan attracts to itself paradox, dichotomy and meetings of opposites.  The dome-builder’s central argument contradicts the commonsensical statement, that Man and God, and reason and spirit, are opposites.  The reader simply finds him/herself assenting, text by text, as one by one they assert different interpretations, and a strange reconciliation is achieved.  Writings about the central plan do not either agree or cancel one another out; they disagree and coexist.  Given then the propensity of the form to generate multiple readings, it seems legitimate to consider it here in another light again.  The prompting to do so comes from a reading of Alberti and an identification of one of his central concerns.

    Often enough, it has been remarked that the central plan frustrates the practice of the liturgy of the Christian Church.  The implication of the charge is that the Renaissance pursuit of a more perfect geometry brought with it a neglect of functional considerations and a failure of respect for traditional usages.[5]  Here, it will be suggested that more than oversight was involved; that the central plan pointedly contains a polemical note that is actually subversive of the kind of religion whose evolution had eventually fixed and installed the traditional liturgy within a longitudinal geometry.  In other words, it will be possible to argue that the central plan was conceived by some, especially Alberti, not just in terms of its own abstract perfection, but functionally, as a container of people and as the representation of a particular social and religious ideal that ran counter to established ritual piety.  A simpler and purer form should supersede that which had been elaborated through time.  The argument must be assembled out of a number of somewhat dispersed elements. And what follows is the argument that the central plan was treated as a metaphor and was a pretext for addressing a multitude of social, religious, moral, philosophical and metaphysical questions.  These questions generated values that could be expressed in terms analogous with the central plan in church architecture.

    First of all, however, it should be remarked that, notwithstanding its appropriateness to various notions current in the Renaissance period and its frequent appearance in ideal planning, the central plan served for few churches actually built in the fifteenth century.[6]  There are, S. Sebastiano in Mantua, S. Maria delle Carceri in Prato, and later, S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi and S. Biagio at Montepulciano.  The Tempietto of Bramante is, of course, the centralised building par excellence; but it is almost too small to count as a space – the essence of the centralised  congregational plan.  Indeed, of the others mentioned, only Santa Maria della Consolazione is so large that a primary congregation function must be conceived for it.  There are examples of centralized structures being appended to traditional longitudinal ones, for example S. Maria degli Angeli and SS. Annunziata in Florence, the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, S. Maria delle Grazie in Milan –Florence Cathedral even. But since they imply differentially privileged places, they complicate the present discussion and can be put aside in the meantime. 

    The importance of the central plan is attested more by the hopes of artists to build them than by their success in getting them off the drawing board.  Filarete and Francesco di Giorgio imagined churches built according to the form.[7]  In particular, it was Leonardo da Vinci who, in his sketchbooks, worked on the theme and its multitude of variations.[8]

    In fact, the central plan appears more often in two dimensions than in three.  Historians measure the strength of the obsession with the form more from its appearance in paintings and drawings than in bricks and mortar.  Brunelleschi’s lost perspective panel of the Florence Baptistry was, of course, the realisation, in a sense, of the centralised plan.  It cannot have appeared too different from one of the most famous centrally-planned buildings of the fifteenth century – again existing only in paint – that in the middle of the Ideal City View, in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino [fig.].  There are many minor examples in painting and marquetry of centrally-planned churches and chapels.  More prominent examples of such buildings in narrative painting are the temples behind Perugino’s Charge to St Peter or Giving of the Keys in the Sistine Chapel [fig.], Raphael’s Sposalizio in the Brera [fig.] and Perugino’s version of the same subject at Caen [fig.].

    Of course, the theme of the central plan might have remained historiographically peripheral were it not for the fact that the most ambitious project of the Renaissance period seems to have grasped at the opportunity to realise it.  Caradosso’s medal of 1506 celebrating the start of the work [fig.] and Bramante’s famous half-plan in the Uffizi (Uffizi 1)[fig.] suggest that St. Peter’s in Rome was, as one stage at any rate, to be centrally-planned.  Michelangelo evidently believed that Bramante’s plan was for a centrally-planned building, for his own deliberate revival of it was centrally-planned. 

    It is in connection with St. Peter’s as, in very general terms, a centrally-planned building that we come across a document indicating that also a social ideal was implicit in the choice of the form.  Michelangelo wrote a letter, criticising the proposals that Antonio da Sangallo the Younger had in place when he took over the work in 1546.

    …Bramante was as excellent an architect as any who had existed from ancient times onwards.  He prepared the first plan for St Peter’s, not full of confusion, but clear and distinct, luminous and free-standing, so that it did not interfere with any part of the [Vatican] palace; and it was considered a beautiful thing, as can still be seen; so that whoever has departed from the design of Bramante, as Sangallo has done, has departed from the truth… By that circle [the ambulatory] which he makes outside it, he firstly takes away all the light from the building of Bramante, and not only this, but in itself it has not got any light at all; and there are so many dark hiding places above and below that they are most convenient for the commission of countless crimes; such as hiding outlaws, coining money, ravishing nuns, and other villainies, so that in the evening when the church has to be closed it would take twentyfive men to find out all those remaining hidden inside…[9]

    This narrative of catastrophic decline from architecture to anarchy is remarkably direct in this text.  Nevertheless, whether Michelangelo is exaggerating or exhibiting signs of hysterical pessimism, he insists upon the linkage between social behaviour and architecture. 

    Specifically, Michelangelo was criticising Antonio da Sangallo’s addition of ambulatories around the church [fig.].  They would increase the footprint of the building at the expense of the Vatican Palace.  They would block some of the windows for which Bramante’s plan made provision.  And in themselves they would be dark warrens.  He does not explain just why the church would become the resort of criminal elements.  But it is easy to see how, in general, dark alleyways and corners are congenial places for such people. 

    Michelangelo’s broader implication, perhaps, is that the ambulatories offer a welcome to cupidity.  In fact, Sangallo’s purpose was largely to provide for pilgrims; to enable them to make a circuit of the arms of the church without disturbing the services.  In practice, pilgrims would be beckoned on their journeys by opportunities to do homage to relics and to claim indulgences from them.  If Michelangelo held a dim view of such practices, he could easily argue that they were only a little short of the criminal acts that he ennumerated.  Christ expelled the money-changers from the temple.

    It follows that there was another church from which criminality would be banished.  Bramante’s plan, and Michelangelo’s own, would perform social cleansing and deny space to the turpitude that Sangallo’s fostered.  The properties of this church were that it be light and without hiding places.[10]  To use the words of Michelangelo’s letter, it would be ‘clear and distinct, luminous and free-standing’.  The Renaissance central plan, again generally considered, has just this quality – that all is visible.  Michelangelo aimed consciously to have it: to deny the purpose also to Bramante as he had his conception represented in the Caradosso medal would seem unnecessary. 

    When the central plan is thought of in Michelangelo’s terms, it becomes possible to compare it with other spaces which have a similar character.  Light and open spaces in general become comparable with the centrally-planned church.  The church that Michelangelo has in view is not morally dissimilar to the rural ride that Alberti describes in De re aedificatoria.  The visibility of things is the nub of probity:

    Outside the city the following rules should apply:  they must be spacious and open, and have views in all directions; they must be clear, and free of any water or rubble; they must leave brigands no place to hide or to lay in ambush; they should not have side roads entering from every direction, exposing them to robbers. [11]

    The idea that good social conduct is encourage by visibility is also expressed elsewhere by Alberti: 

    The crossroad and the forum differ only in size.  In fact the crossroad is but a small forum.  Plato recommended that at every crossroad there be a space where nurses with children could meet occasionally and be together.  I believe that the purpose behind this was not only to strengthen the children in the fresh air, but also to encourage the nurses to be neat by exposing them to the eyes of so many curious observers, and make them less sloppy, since they are eager for praise.  The presence of an elegant portico, under which the elders may [stroll] or sit, take a nap or negotiate business, will be an undoubted ornament to both crossroad and forum.  Furthermore, the presence of the elders will restrain the youth, as they play and sport in the open, and curb any misbehaviour or buffoonery resulting from the immaturity of their years.[12]

    Giannozzo Alberti, in Book 3 of De familia, makes self-presentation for public scrutiny a key quality of the ideal place to live.  He has been asked what are the most important, and lists good air, food and wine.  And would he settle there, asks Leonardo.  Giannozzo replies, ‘Dove io bene mi riposassi e bene fussi veduto.’ (p.233, l.1202-3)  He would wish to be able to settle down and be well-regarded.  Battista, the principal interlocutor in De iciarchia, Book II, connects openness and honesty in speakers and writers: ‘L’omo grave, circunspetto, dato alla virtù, ornato di buon costumi, mai fra’ pensieri suoi accetterà deliberazione alcuna quale e’ recusasse esporla e palesarla a tutti e’ suoi amici e nimici. E così noi che instituimmo esser simile a loro, esplicaremo a noi stessi e’ pensieri nostri non con altra mente che se tutti e’ nostri amici e nimici in presenza ci vedessero.’[13]

    An insolent carelessness of scrutiny is found in the delinquent.  In the dialogue, Cena Familiaris, Battista observes of people addicted to gaming, “Giuocano dove a caso soviene loro, spesso su qualche desco sordido e puzzulente, in luogo alioquin frequentato, né si curano essere veduti e biasimati da molti.”[14]  For him, the piazza was an admirable provision in a city because good citizens acted publicly there. They could be expected to be praised for their good conduct, and bad behaviour was open to universal reprimand.[15]  In Book IV of De familia, Adovardo expresses impatience with theorists of conviviality.  Talking of benevolence and friendship, he says, ‘Ne puossi bene averne dottrina solo dai libri muti e oziosi.  Conviensi in mezzo alle piazze, entro a’ teatri e fra e’ privati ridutti averne altra essercitazione e manifesta esperienza.’[16] The piazza was the scene and expression of civilisation itself.  It is against the background of this truism that Alberti set one of the speeches of Momus, the nature of whose eponymous anti-hero is to act offensively and in contradiction to harmony and decorum.  He praises the vagabond life: ”I won’t allow that kings enjoy the use of riches more than beggars: the theatres belong to beggars, the porticoes to beggars – in fact, every public place belongs to beggars!  Others wouldn’t dare sit in the forum and bicker with a slightly raised voice.  Afraid of the raised eyebrows of their elders, others don’t dare do anything lawless or immoral in public, they’ll do nothing of their own free will and choice.  While you, beggar, will lie lounging round the forum, shouting freely, doing whatever takes your fancy.’[17]  Momus would as cheerfully tell blue jokes to the vicar.  Alberti expressed the matter of praiseworthy conduct in the piazza in De Familia:

    Non in mezzo agli ozii privati, ma intra le publiche esperienze nasce la fama; nelle publiche piazze surge la gloria; in mezzo de’ popoli si nutrisce le lode con voce e iudicio di molti onorati.  Fugge la fama ogni solitudine e luogo privato, e volontieri siede e dimora sopra e’ theatri, presente alle conzioni e celebrità; ivì si collustra e alluma il nome di chi con molto sudore e assiduo studio di buone cose sè stessi tradusse fuori di taciturnità e tenebre, d’ignoranza e vizii.[18]  

    The piazza is both literal and emblematic.  Alberti has it that idleness (ozio) is opposed to energetic moral conduct.  It seeks out dark places (tenebre) as opposed to the spotlight (alluma) of approval that falls upon virtue acted out in public.  Social disengagement, darkness and ignorance are, for Alberti, closely connected.  Sofrona, in the short dialogue of that name, responds to Battista’s accusation that women are shrill and unintelligent by saying that, if they should be freed from their domestic prison and should interact in public life, it would be a different story. ‘Ché se così fusse a noi licito non starci sedendo solitarie in casa in ombra, ma crescere fuori in mezzo l’uso e conversazion delle persone, che credi? Oh Iddio, qual sarebbe e quanta la prudenza nostra maravigliosa e incredibile!’[19]  Michelangelo says of the church what Alberti says of the piazza.

    To seek to remove oneself from public scrutiny was reprehensible, whatever the arena.  The piazza is scrutiny’s emblematic theatre.  The church, for Alberti, was also a public space.  He expressed his disapproval of those members of the modern clergy who turned it into a hiding place rather than one of openness.  At the end of a brief history of Christianity in De re aedificatoria, he says, ‘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.’[20]  Michelangelo might almost have had this passage in mind when he wrote to Bartolomeo Ferratino about St Peter’s.  Alberti’s criticism here is of reclusive clergyman and – more crucially – the disengaged Church.

    *[ Cf.Gianozzo on what the villa does for morality: Vedendomi spesso, raro [the peasants] peccarebbono.’ p.243, Furlan.  The moral issue is the same.  Della famiglia is about government. Visibility is also a concern that Giannozzo Manetti’s description of Nicholas V’s project for the Vatican returns to several times.  The church of St Peter is going to be lighter and the public are going to see the pope and the spectacle better; and the pope himself is going to see better: “In summitate vero tribunae solium pontificale altius eminebat, ut et ipse ab omnibus circumstantibus videretur, ac pariter omnes astantes sedentesque videret.” (Magnuson, 358, Smith O’Connor para 46)]

    The terms of Alberti’s criticism of the Church are those same ones contrasting the openness of the piazza with secret and dark places.  In addition, the idea of public space that polices itself – light, and without obstacles to vision and scrutiny – was important in religious and secular terms.  As well as utility, it prompted the paving of squares and streets – a task undertaken in a multitude of instances thoughout the period.  The creation of areas where citizens could act with social as well as physical poise seems to have been a laudible undertaking.  Certainly, it was shaming for one’s city to be unpaved.[21]  Here, is suggestion for a reading of those posturing figures in the city backgrounds of so many later fifteenth-century paintings: their athleticism signifies the stable and true surface upon which they move and is to be understood as a sign of decorousness – a social and even a moral value.

    The piazza features frequently in Renaissance art, sometimes dotted with figures and groups, as in the pictures by Perugino and Raphael already mentioned.  At other times, as in the Urbino City View, it is empty of people [fig.]; but they can be imagined.  The use of the one-point perspective construction allows the viewer to see and – more importantly – understand its extent and limits; and it thus holds no secrets.  These are scenes that exclude the possibility of surreptitious acts going undiscovered.  The result is that social peace is assured.[22]  Everything is candid.  The idea that the piazza is a place of virtue, protected by virtue and under virtue’s scrutiny is nowhere made clearer than in the City View in Baltimore.[fig.]  It is a habitable and an allegorical city.  Pure water is collected from the fountain in the middle of the piazza at the four corners of which are columns supporting statues of the Cardinal Virtues.[23]  

    The fifteenth-century equivalent of plein-aireism – emulating the limitless acccessibility to visual enquiry of Flemish landscape backgrounds – in Piero’s Triumphs of Federigo and Battista Sforza in the Uffizi, stands in exhilarating contrast to the closed and emblematic content of the foreground.[fig.]  The virtues that accompany the prince and his wife are made visible for miles around, and their public role rather than their function as mere decoration of personality – as mere flattery – becomes insistently implicit.  What could have been epithets are made into qualities – real things rather than imputations.  The openness and luminous nature of the scene carries a promise of civic virtue, of Good Government.  The triumphant progress of Virtue that Alberti described in Momus should be consistent with an ekphrastic reading of Piero’s Triumphs.[24]

    Openness is the virtue of the piazza, and it lends that virtue to people who will act out their lives within it.  Praise of life lived publicly (and unease about the value and nobility of the cloistered life) is a recurrent theme in the period.[25]  Poggio Bracciolini, for example, praised Republican Rome as a place of free men engaged in the political life of the state.  Their arena was the forum, where he pictured public debate going on.  The coming of the Empire, however, saw the decay of the life of the forum.[26]  It is perhaps fair to conjecture that he had a visual image of that decayed state of things – the victory of barbarianism in the form of the ruins of the Forum Romanum.[27]  Where there had been light there was now darkness, particularly of the intellectual kind.[28]

    The piazza is emblematically the scene of human life observed compassionately, and inviting moral judgement in Alberti’s De Pictura/Della pittura.  Alberti locates the painted action, the historia/istoria upon the pavement that he constructs mathematically using the costruzione legittima.[29]  Of course, the painter was not obliged to create a flat piazza for his drama; but it could be argued that Alberti conceived the action and the place of the action in terms of a single homogeneous space.  The embracing essence is visibility.  Alberti said as much: ‘The painter seeks to imitate only that which is visible.’[30]  What is literally or metaphorically hidden – behind the rood screen or in the crypt as well as in Eternity or Heaven – is not the stuff of painting.  It is even possible to suggest that, for Alberti, it was not the stuff of the moral life either.

    A space of public congregation was conducive to social harmony and morality.  The secular space of the piazza had similar properties to the space of the church, provided the latter made visible the activities of its occupants.  Alberti hints at this state of things in his prologue to Della pittura.  He describes Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence Cathedral as ‘ample to cover with its shadow the entire Tuscan people’.[31]  The image that this passage conjures up is the Madonna della Misericordia, the Madonna sheltering the faithful under her mantle.  The Church as an institution and the church as a building both embrace everyone.  Alberti seems to have been inspired to write this passage (whether it be read as a specific calling-up of the image of the Madonna della Misericordia or not) by the unity of the space under the dome.  The people is one people because each is visible to all.  The Hebrew temple performed a similar act of unification: ‘… una enim gens uno consensu et instituto religioni dicata uno erit deo tuta et munita.’[32]  The visibility of piazza and church are connected in the passage where Alberti pronounces upon where the church should be located.

    Finally, you should situate the temple in a busy, well-known, and – as it were – proud place, free of any profane contamination; to this end it should address a large, noble square and be surrounded by spacious streets, or, better still, dignified squares, so that it is perfectly visible from every direction.[33]

    He was surely thinking of visibility in moral as well as optical terms. 

    Visibility of these two kinds seems also to have been part of his aim for the church of Sant’ Andrea in Mantua.  In his letter probably of 1470, to Lodovico Gonzaga, the marquis of Mantua, he recommended his own design for the building, listing its advantages over an earlier one.  Practical, aesthetic and moral considerations are mixed together: it would be ‘…more spacious, durable, grander and brighter [lieto].’[34]  The word lieto, combines notions of joy and lightness.  In intending a light space, Alberti was proposing an emphatically congregational use for the church.  This dogmatism on Alberti’s part becomes clear when his recommendations for Sant’ Andrea are set in the context of his thinking in De re aedificatoria.  As has been seen, in Book VII, Chapter 4, he explained that the church, in general, consisted of a sacramental and a congregational space – the one, light and containing depictions of meritorious conduct; the other dark and containing matter for the eye not of sense but of intellect.

    There is a useful connection of values to be drawn between Alberti’s prologue to Della pittura  praising the congregational place and a passage in De re aedificatoria.  In Book VIII. Chapter 7, Alberti has recourse to irony to defend buildings for popular resort and display – ‘show buildings’.  These are theatres and circuses:

    Nor dare I criticize pontiffs or any other moral teachers for their well-considered condemnation of the use of show buildings.[35]

    He then goes on to present Moses’ view on the matter, which runs quite counter.  A discriminating judge would know whose view should command more respect.

    Moses is praised for being the first to gather his entire nation into a single temple on feast days, and for bringing them together at set times to celebrate the harvest.[36]

    Moses’ action prefigures the communion service of the Christian Church, as it was acted out in the early days.[37]

    His motive, I might suggest, was but the desire to cultivate the minds of the citizens through concourse and communion, and to make them more receptive to the benefits of friendship.  Thus to my mind our ancestors established show buildings within their cities as much for functional reasons as for any festivity or pleasure.  And surely, if we think the matter over carefully, we find frequent cause to regret that so splendid and useful an institution is now long obsolete.[38]

    It is difficult to think that Alberti has overlooked, and the attentive reader is to pass over, the fact that an institutional building type did exist to bring about concourse and communion.  That any church building should be so arranged as to inhibit such usage would be regrettable.  Florence Cathedral, as completed by Brunelleschi, made just the provision of which Alberti approved.  Brunelleschi’s building of the dome of Florence Cathedral can be thought of as reviving Mosaic and Early Christian religion.

    Alberti’s delight in Santa Maria del Fiore is clear from his prologue to Della Pittura, where Brunelleschi’s dome is singled out for especial praise, and from the passage in Profugiorum ab aerumna, where Agnolo Pandolfini describes it in terms of the season of Spring.[39]  Alberti gathered together his affirmative feelings in an act of theatre that he coopted the cathedral to perform in 1444, when he organised the Certame Coronario.  It was a poetry competition with the theme of amicizia.  That dome that had embraced the entire Tuscan people in the Prologue was now a crown about the heads of the celebrants of friendship, a universal value – for the poems were to be in the vernacular.  Alberti’s own poem must have drawn the audience’s attention to the moral action of the dome.  His ideas and feelings about Santa Maria del Fiore constitute, as has been said above, a golden thread in his thinking, and are therefore allocated a separate chapter.

    In the meantime, there can be noted a tone of didacticism.  Alberti has conceived the cathedral, and especially the centrally-focussed part beneath the dome, as in singular architectural  concordance with the principle around which the event assembled itself.  The whole action and scenario combined in what, we might suggest, was Alberti’s attempt to make an addition to the liturgy.  The poets took the place of the clergy to raise hymns in praise of the human bond and to inspire the audience to make fellowship the lamp of their lives.  The Certame Coronario was surely produced in order to realise afresh the liturgy of the early Christians when, inspired to amicizia about the common table, they were fired to return to their daily lives in the spirit of charity.[40]

    This was radical theatre to a remarkable degree.  In what it did not include, it carried a message of rejection of the established liturgy.[41] Alberti inserts, in place of divine intervention, a mere simile.  The emotion of those who can imagine the crown is not less heightened than that of those who assert the reality of the Divine Presence.  In fact, the inspiring and instructing drama has been accessible without belief or faith being required of the witnesses.  Alberti grounds the moral life, through the liturgy of the Certame Coronario, beyond the reach of supernaturalism.  He seems to have aimed at nothing short of the invasion of the sanctum of the clergy and the reframing of the functions of the Christian Church in a return to earliest practices.

    Considered in this way, the Certame Coronario was surely intended to be a recurring occasion.  What were required were new poets, voices eager to dedicate themselves anew to the articulation of the meaning and affect of amicizia.  Where were they to come from?  The answer must be; from the constituency of the virtuous.  If the clergy would participate, it would not be ex officio.  Alberti would expect them to emerge, no doubt, from the class of which he was a member, that of civic humanists. 

    The Certame Coronario was a project of quite astounding intrepidity and ambition.  It stands as Alberti’s attempt to fashion a Christian Renaissance.  If undoing the depredations of the barbarians demanded the excavation of the works of the ancient Romans, the recovery of the values of the early Christian Church required the removal of the centuries’ accretions of self-seeking piety and redundant ritual.

    Specifically, the ‘show buildings’ that Alberti recommends are, on the one hand, for ‘leisure and peaceful recreation’ and, on the other, ‘business and military training’.[42]  The discussion of Moses’ actions has served as prelude to the identification of architectural facilities for the development of ‘intellectual energy and mental ability’ and ‘toughness and strength of body and soul’.[43]  Given the rôle of Moses as mentor here, the temple is to be understood as having functions overlapping with those of theatres and stadia. 

    Alberti’s introduction of Moses into the discussion of show buildings blurs the distinction between beneficial secular and religious buildings.  It also perplexes in the context of an architectural treatise, for, as has been seen, Moses’ principal action in relation to his people was as guide during their nomadic existence in Sinai.  He made the tabernacle the centre of communal virtue.  But in addition, there is the fact that Alberti finds the benefits of friendship or social cohesion in both kinds of place and describes the Early Christian environment that fostered it almost in the Mosaic terms above.  Alberti pictured a better state of Christianity and of society than that of his own days:

    In ancient times, in the primitive days of our religion, it was the custom for good men to come together for a common meal. They did not do this to fill their bodies at a feast, but to become humbler through their communication, and to fill their minds with sound instruction, so that they would return home all the more intent upon virtue. […] Everyone would burn with concern for the common salvation and with a love of virtue.  Finally they would leave an offering in the center, each according to his means, as a form of tax due to piety and a donation towards those who deserved it.  Everything would be shared in this way, as between loving brothers. 

    Later, when princes allowed these meetings to become public, there was little deviation from the original custom […] There would be a single altar, where they would meet to celebrate no more than one sacrifice each day. 

    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.[44]

    Alberti’s belief that the religious sentiment should be involved with a social one found confirmation again in Hebrew values where he quoted from the law that, ‘… you should be one people, of common feeling and common undertaking, given to religion, and preserved and defended by a single god.’[45]

    If public secular space – most prominently, the piazza – and public religious space – the church – could be congregational, with the virtuous conduct that that implies, so long as all was light and visible within it, it becomes possible to suggest that any centralized and, more specifically, circular space would serve as theatre or amphitheatre for such values.  There is one particularly celebrated space in early 16th-century architecture which calls out to be interpreted in the light of the present discussion. 

    Raphael’s Villa Madama was to be built about two axes at right angles to one another.  They were to meet in the circular courtyard, half of which stands today.  The cross-roads that Alberti describes above resembles the arrangement.  Axial symmetry and a loose distribution of functional parts combine in the building.  Where there was symmetry, there would be a certain ritual progress to make; and Shearman describes just such a journey, as that of dignitaries, come to visit Rome and, specifically, to present their credentials to the Pope.[46]  The place of arrival and meeting was the circular courtyard.[fig.]  Once formal welcomes and thanks had been given, guests and those receiving them could disperse themselves about the villa and engage in its various pleasures.  The circular courtyard is the nodal point.[47]  This is where formality meets friendship, and where they are not to be disentangled one from another.  There is a meeting of opposites here.  Perhaps this is what civilised social relations are, obedience to rule and freedom implied in its ideal locus, the circle. 

    Raphael had thought about the possibility of formal and convivial encounter before.  The Sposalizio of 1504in the Brera shows a meeting of what might be called social axes.[fig.]  A path has been followed by the priest: he has traced a line from the temple in the background and down the axis of the picture plane.  It is the route of the ritualistic.  Mary’s and Joseph’s groups have followed paths at right angles, parallel to the picture plane and from left and right respectively.  All have shifted emotionally from the tone implicit in their journeys, at this place of their encounter.  Mary and Joseph, after the cheerful informality of their journeys, now make solemn their bond.  Raphael couches it at the point of intersection of affection and solemnity.  The priest, by contrast with Mary and Joseph, descends literally and from formality to participate in the human feeling that joins the marriage-couple.  He inclines his head and puts his weight into a contrapposto pose, holding the wrists of Mary and Joseph in a somewhat diffident underhand.  By this brilliantly simple conception, Raphael shows that the choice may be theirs.  The marriage group meets in a loose-ish semi-circle which the observer or celebrant closes into a circle.  To trace the spatial and moral routes and to find them met in this place and moment is to celebrate friendship and order in a similar way as at the Villa Madama.  Alberti had earlier voiced the spirit in which both actions would be conceived.

    A prominent provision of the country house in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria was ‘… a generous reception area for the arrival of guests…’[48] The occasion was to be marked by acknowledged courtesies.  Reception hurried or casual was graceless and to be avoided.  The space could not be cramped.  Piero had felt the same compunction in staging the ‘Meeting of Solomon and Sheba’, an episode in The Legend of the True Cross in S. Francesco at Arezzo.  Almost wasteful of available plaster surface for figuration, the architecture of the reception hall precociously takes up half of the picture plane and leaves room for the figures to move and breath.  Alberti wrote about the courtyard of the country house as a congregational place.  In fact, ‘The most important part is that which we shall call the ‘bosom’ of the house, although you might refer to it as the ‘court’ or ‘atrium’ […] is the main part of the house, acting like a public forum, toward which all other lesser members converge; it should incorporate a comfortable entrance, and also openings for light, as appropriate.’[49]  The Latin word, sinus, means a large bowl.  Alberti’s metaphor is circular.  There is perhaps a recollection in the use of the word of the verse from St Luke (16.22).  The theme is charity: ‘And it came to pass that the beggar died and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom (in sinum Abrahae).’

    The descriptive terms of Alberti’s country house create the image of an intimate society of friendship under benign guidance.  Here, as elsewhere in De re aedificatoria,  Alberti invites a reading of architecture in terms of sensibility and morality.[50]  The social tone of the country house is of virtue, even a sort of piousness.  Presented is an ideal which, he clearly intends, is to operate not just at home, but also at large.  In political society and lay religious society, the same moral tone is to be desired.  Whilst on the scale of the house he would have a reception space, at the scale of the city he would, as he implies above by referring to a ‘forum’, have a public square: ‘…should ambassadors or legates from some foreign country arrive to request an audience with the senate, it is as well to have somewhere worthy of both guest and city to receive them while they wait.’[51]

    The circular courtyard of the Villa Madama would have satisfied Alberti’s requirements admirably.  Domestic, political and religious harmony will all be present.  Moreover, it has universal access, communication and light.  This passage could have been Michelangelo’s text when he preached against Antonio da Sangallo’s iniquitous design for St Peter’s. 

    So, church, country house and piazza have become overlapping moral-architectural concepts; receiving human beings in visible congregation.  Social assembly where all is patent will be harmonious and morally sound.  Salvation, for Alberti and Michelangelo, was properly a desideratum for people identifying their interest with that of the rest of society.  In holding to this view, they were subscribing in effect to a critique of society and the Church as they found them, where private happiness and personal salvation were being pursued at the expense of civilisation itself.[52]  The image of the common weal was the piazza and suchlike places.  The arena of salvation for those engaged virtuously with their fellows, acting out Christ’s New Commandment, and being prepared to return, rededicated, to the world – to piazza and cortile – was the church where no nook or cranny gave shelter to self-interest.  Michelangelo believed that Bramante conceived such a church in St. Peter’s.

    It also existed in embryo, when Bramante designed the Tempietto.[53][fig.10]  Perhaps the easiest way to recognise the morally-defined nature of his work there – building and cloister as drawn by Serlio – is to imagine it occupied by different classes of people, bearing their attributes.  It is assuredly no place for the nomad with his bundle, nor yet the warrior with his sword, and the merchant with his purse is equally out of place.  The proper occupant of the place is not burdened by necessity; he does not fight for his share, nor is he lured by self-interest.  Just such a social selectivity had applied in the Ideal City View which he might has seen in his native Urbino.

    Here is reason to believe that when Bramante came to designing St. Peter’s, he instituted the same sort of selection process: a single, luminous congregational space would confirm friendship and salvation as a common rather than a personal goal.[54]  It was this ideal of Christian society that Michelangelo found betrayed in Antonio da Sangallo’s den of brigandage and selfishness and which Alberti had attempted to describe in his writings.

    —————————-

    Recall the Barbaro brothers’ motto at Maser: Nil tecti sub tecto:  Nothing is concealed beneath our roof

    De re, VIII, 8: Sub divo –aiebat Celsus physicus – commodius exercemur quam in umbra.’  Celsus, the physician, says that it is better we exercise in the open air that indoors. Orlandi/Portoghesi 755.

    Della famiglia, Furlan, p.55: ‘La natura, ottima constitutrice delle cose, volle nell’uomo non solo che viva palese e in mezzo degli altri uomini, ma certo ancora pare gli abbia imposta necessità che con ragionamento e cion altri molti modi comunichi e discopra a’ medesimi uomini ogni sua passione e affezione…’ (connects the present theme with the Historia)

    Della Famiglia, Furlan, p.252.  Giannozzo will be candid with his factors.  They, seeing that nothing is hidden from them, will be honest in their dealings.

    [De re, V, 2; reception spaces in houses should be centrally-located and like vestibules and porticoes – public places.  Candor and mutual and self regulating belong there.  There’s a good passage to quote.]

    There’s the theme that links the house and the church: the house is, properly, holy.  Explain via the case of Giannozzo, in Della Famiglia, the representative of early Christian and Hebrew virtue.  In De re, there will be one people, one temple and one altar.  Giannozzo will have one roof, one fire and one table.  The tone is present in the description of the house in De re where there will be a chapel and the receiving of guests with Christ-like benevolence (see also, Della Famiglia, Furlan, 233).

    Della famiglia, p.19, Furlan; discussion of how vice hidden, grows.  Light, it follows, makes virtues grow.  Darkess, the reverse.  Recall the Intercoenalis “Suspitio’.

    Wilkins, p.60.  The honest man is self-revealing.  He is a social creature. [Furlan, p.55]

    On the good man as like a place of public resort (p.221), and vice versa.

    For servants being careless when they’re not being observed, see Furlan, p.288, Lionardo.

    Furlan, p.296, Lionardo: on how it’s difficult to tell one’s friends from enemies ‘in tanta ombra di fizioni, in tanta oscurita di volunta, e in tante tenebri d’errori e vizii…’

    Della famiglia [Furlan, 243], going back and forth to the villa frequently, ‘…quelli lavoratori, vedendomi spesso, raro peccarebbono, e a me portarebbono piu amore e piu riverenza.’

    For the importance of witnesses as a disuasion from bad conduct, V, 7, De re, 363, the placing of nunneries in places not too remote.

    P.P.Vergerio. De Ingenuis moribus, introd. ‘This duty, common indeed to all parents, is specially incumbent upon such as hold high station. For the lives of men of position are passed, as it were, in public view; and are fairly expected to serve as witness to personal merit and [page 97] capacity on part of those who occupy such exceptional place amongst their fellow men.’

    Again, PP Vergerio: What a warning is here conveyed [page 105] of the critical judgments which posterity passes upon Princes! They live in a light in which

    nothing can long remain hid.

    Giannozzo says (p.233), in answer to Leonardo’s question, ‘E quivi vi fermeresti?’’ ‘Dove io bene mi riposassi e bene fussi veduto.’ (l.1201-3)

    The notary and his client, making an agreement that all can see and check for legality, live ‘in piazza’.  It’s where literacy – meaning under universal scrutiny – exists too.  Adovardo, in Bk IV of Della famiglia, insists upon morality being tested in piazza: “You have to live in the world, however, and deal with the actual ways and habits of men.”(p.266, Furlan, p.351).  In Bk III of De pictura, the painter puts his picture before the public, for judgement and advice (para.61)

    See Francesco Alberti’s (1401-79) poems in  Lirici Toscani del Quattrocento a cura di Antonio Lanza,  They refer quite often to moral action ‘in piazza’.

    Momus Book II 49: in praise of the vagabond life: ”I won’t allow that kings enjoy the use of riches more than beggars: the theatres belong to beggars, the porticoes to beggars – in fact, every public place belongs to beggars!  Others wouldn’t dare sit in the forum and bicker with a slightly raised voice.  Afraid of the raised eyebrows of their elders, others don’t dare do anything lawless or immoral in public, they’ll do nothing of their own free will and choice.  While you, beggar, will lie lounging round the forum, shouting freely, doing whatever takes your fancy.’(cf Lucian, The Parasite, trans. Guarino 1418)  The degree of the offensiveness of this conduct is the greater because we know that Alberti believes that one should be civilised by being kept in public view.

    See stuff on Sixtus IV for a discussion of morality ‘in chiostro’ and ‘in piazza’ – historia.  Buildings can have this sort of morality.

    Vergerio, De ingenuis moribus, says, near the beginning, that boys should be encouraged to look at themselves in a mirror so that, if he has a noble aspect, he may be mindful to act in accordance with it and, if he hasn’t, to cultivate the inner man by way of compensation.  Later on, he says that the criticisms of our friends is like a true mirror.

    Cena Familiare:  On gambling.  Battista says:

    Giuocano dove a caso soviene loro, spesso su qualche desco sordido e

                  puzzulente, in luogo alioquin frequentato, n* si curano

                  essere veduti e biasimati da molti. (see version in this machine)  See also the passage in Momus where the vagabond life is praised because the vagabond need have no fear of anyone as he makes a nuisance of himself in the piazza.

    Openness is a good thing.  However, gossip, as a product of idleness, is to be reprehended.  See, De iciarchia, p.9 (electronic)  He pictures those whose vices assemble around gossip, going out at night. ‘Niuno di loro mai vide levare il sole; anzi perduto in quel buio gran parte del dì…’See above, c.p.200

    De Porcaria Conjuratione (Opera Inedita et pauca …, p.262): ‘Cognitis apud pontificem per indicem, quae agerentur, visum est noctem ipsam dissimulare, quod intelligeret multos occultandi facinoris spe concursoros ad scelus nocta, si quidturbarum concivissent, qui in luce quiescerent.’

    Palladio Book II, good on the grain being kept distant from the master’s quarters because of its dustiness, but its need yet to be within sight.

    Momus IV, 102.  ‘The notebook advised that all resources should be divided into three piles.  The ruler should make one pile of good and desirable things, another of evil, and a third pile consisting of things that are in themselves neither good nor evil.  He should distribute these as follows.  He should order Industry, Vigilance, Zeal, Diligence, Constancy and other gods like them to fill their pockets from the pile of good things, then empty their pockets freely at crossroads, in porticoes, theatres, temples, fora and all public places, offering the good things to whomever they met and handing them over graciously and gladly to whoever wanted them.  Envy, Ambition, Pleasure, Laziness and Cowardice and other gods like them should fill their pockets to the brim with evils, and should go about disbursing them spontaneously to whoever wanted them. The things that were neither good nor bad would be good for those who used them well and bad for those who used them badly; these included riches, honors and such things as mortals sought.  These should all be left to Fortune’s judgement. She should fill her hands with them, and decide who should receive them and how much to give to each one, as the fancy took her.’

    Momus, II, 2.  The practice (of prayer) spread, thanks to the even-handed kindness of the gods, until fathers and adults began to say prayers, too.  Initially their prayers were righteous and of the sort that could be made openly in public, with the approval of friends and enemies alike, and so the gods heard their prayers freely and with good will.  Then it transpired that even kings and wealthy republics grew used to making demands on the gods in prayer. (compare the candour of the early Christians passing into the quest for individual salvation)

    On candour/light.  Intercoenalis, Suspitio.  Truth and reason attempt to remove the plant that  has grown in the flames on the altar and, with its broad leaves was threatening to extinguish the fire.  Janus advises that they take it outside.  As soon as it saw the sunlight, it vanished from sight.  It was Suspicion. (One wonders, if Alberti is being straight in saying that the sanctuary of the temple should be dark.)  Suspicion is to be taken out at the roots (which, in truth, it doesn’t have), not by the removal of the leaves.  Causes, not symptoms.

    The effects of darkness in the horse’s stable.  De equo animante (Albertiana, Vol.II, 1999, p.225: ‘We shan’t omit to say that we understand, then, that if it remains inactive for a long time, especially in a dark stable, the horse will become completely incapable of action, and, before all noises, even little ones, and all objects that one presents to his unexpecting vision, and nervous, timorous and unable to move.’ To be connected with ideas of government, his statement in the anonymous Life, that Alberti applied himself, but with an invisible artistry to gracefulness – walking in the city, horseriding and speaking.  The arts are of self-government, of government and rational government (ie a system that involves reciprocity among citizens).  Grafton concentrates upon these activities as forms of performance (in which case, of course, nothing is gained from ennumerating them).

    De re, IV, 2: ‘Moreover your city ought to stand in the middle of its territory, in a place from whence it can have a view of all its country, and watch its opportunities, and be ready whenever necessity calls…’ (cf the spider)

    V,9. ‘…it becomes the republic to have a place suitable to the dignity both of the stranger and of the city, to receive them in, while they wait for introduction.’

    Open space: ‘Moreover, for a still greater addition of reverence and dignity, I would have a very handsome open space left both within and without the walls, and dedicated to the public liberty; which should not be cumbered up by any person whatsoever, either with trench, wall, hedge, or shrub, under very great penalties.’(VII, 2)

    ‘Lastly, the place where you intend to fix a temple, ought to be noted, famous, and indeed stately, clear from all contagion of secular things, and, in order thereunto, it should have a spacious area in its front, and be surrounded on every side with great streets, or rather with noble squares, that you may have a beautiful view of it on every side.’ (VII, 3)

    Light (visibility?) in a noble place is part of the theme of Apologio XXIV.  The oil of the vestal lamps laments being consumed and receiving no credit for it from the flame.  The flame states that the oil dies with honour in the temple, but not in a place of ill repute. (the message, I suppose, is that those without honour seek praise; those with honour are content to do what it is their nature to do)

    Annuli: The forecourt of the mind, one’s brow and features, should be open to all who seek light.  Love and truth should shine around it so that every shadow of suspicion and every darkness of hatred are destroyed (Marsh, 215) ‘hoc vestibulum animi, quod est frons et vultus, pateat ultro quaerentibus lucem, flragansque circumfulgeat catitas, veritas, omnisque suspicionum umbra et odii nox intereat.’(Mancini, p.232)

    Alberti IX,2, p.792: The whole construction [of the villa] and its presentation, that is to say a factor which in every building  contributes greatly to its appreciation, should be perfectly apparent and evident from every point.  Exposed to the clear and joyful sky, it should receive great quantities of light, sun and wholesome air.  There should not be anything visible from any direction which can annoy by throwing gloomy shadow.’(Mazzini)

    Profugiorum [Agnolo]: Un precetto approvano gli antichi a vivere in pura tranquillità e quiete d’animo: che mai pure pensi far cosa quale tu non facessi presente gli amici e nimici tuoi. Ma a me pare potere affermare questo, che chi viverà disposto di mai dir parola non verissima, a costui mai verrà in mente cosa non da volerla fare palese in mezzo della moltitudine, in teatro.

    Leonardo points to the mood that the freshness of villa life raises: ‘E anche vi godete in villa quelli giorni aerosi e puri, aperti e lietissimi…“[55]  Giannozzo develops the point, identifying the escape that it offers from wickedness: ‘Si, Dio, uno proprio paradiso.  E anche, quello che piu giova, puoi alla villa fuggire questi strepiti, questi tumulti, questa tempesta della terra, della piazza, del palagio.’[56]

    [1]

    [2] Robin Evans recently provided a useful discussion of the central plan, accompanied by bibliography.  He took, as his starting point, Wolfflin’s formalism in contrast to Wittkower’s symbolism.  Wittkower himself had a battle to fight with critics and historians who, as part of their argument for paganism in the period, emphasised formal properties.  The battle is largely won, for it is clear nowadays that Renaissance Christian piety was thoroughly real – if different from that of the builders and decorators of Gothic and Romanesque religious buildings.  See, R. Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (M.I.T. Press: Cambridge, Mass., London), 1995, pp.3-47.

    [3]Palladio, for example (Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, Book IV, Chap.2), recommended the circular figure as the basis of the plan of a church because is could be taken to represent God: “…it is exceeding proper to demonstrate the infinite essence, the uniformity and the justice of God.”(Isaac Ware ed. (London, 1738), p.82); ‘[la ritonda] e attissima a dimostrare la unità, la infinita essenza, la uniformità, et la giustizia di Deo.'(Georg Olms: Hildesheim, New York, 1979, foreword E. Fossmann, p.6).  The circular dome placed over square space recalls Vitruvian Man, who fits into a circle and a square and signifies the perfect simplicity of God’s plan.  An imitation of the geometry of Man testifies to his preeminence in the order of earthly creation.

    [4]S. Sinding-Larsen attempts to discuss symbol, ritual and space in Iconography and Ritual:  A Study of Analytical Perspectives (Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Tromsø: Universitetsforlaget AS, 1984).

    [5]For example, this is the gist of the criticisms made by Giovanni Aldobrandini of the rotonda of SS. Annunziata in Florence in 1470.  The activities proper to the choir, chapel and main chapel would interfere with one another.  See, F. Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti: L’Opera Completa (Milano: Electa, 1980), p.278.

    [6]R.Wittkower (Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (Tiranti: London, 1967), p.20) lists the small number of centrally planned churches built in the fifteenth century and the larger number in the sixteenth.

    [7] Filarete’s Trattati contain many illustrations of centrally planned churches.  See the facsimile edition of J. Spencer (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1965).  For Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s thinking on the theme, see, Trattati di Architettura, Ingegneria e Arte Militare, eds. C. Maltese and L. Degrassi (Edizione il Polifilo: Milano, 1967), Vol.I, Tav.17 to Tav.22 and Vol.II, Tav.235.

    [8] See for example, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Leonardo da Vinci, Engineer and Architect, Exhibition catalogue, 22.5.87 to 8.9.87; C. Pedretti, Leonardo Architect (Thames and Hudson: London, 1986).

    [9]See above, Architectural Impiety 1, note 1.   P. Portoghesi, Architettura del Rinascimento a Roma (Electa: Milan, 1979), pp.209-11, Letter of Michelangelo to Bartolomeo Ferratino, 1555: ‘E non si può negare che Bramante non fusse valente nella architettura, quanto ogni altro che sia stato dagli antichi in qua.  Lui pose la prima pianta di Santo Pietro, non piena di confusione, ma chiara e schietta, luminosa a isolata attorno, in modo che non nuoceva a cosa nessuna del palazzo; e fu tenuta cosa bella, e come ancora è manifesto; in modo che chiunque s’è discostato da detto ordine di Bramante, come a’ fatto il Sangallo, s’è discostato dalla verità; [e se così è, che a’ occhi non appassionati, nel suo modello lo può vedere.]  Lui con quel circolo che è (sic) fa di fuori, la prima cosa toglie tutti lumi a la pianta di Bramante, e non solo questo, ma per se non a ancora lume nessuno: e tanti nascondigli fra di sopra e di sotto, scuri, che fanno comodità grande a infinite ribalderie; come tener segretamente sbanditi, far monete false, impegniar monache e altre ribalderie, in modo che la sera, quando detta chiesa si serrasi, bisognerebbe venticinque uomini a cercare chi si restassi nascosto dentro, [e con fatica gli troverebbe in modo starebbe].  Ancora si sarebbe quest’altro inconveniente, che nel circuire con l’aggiunta che il modello fa di fuora detta [sic] composizione del Bramante, saria forza di mandare in terra la cappella Paolo, le stanze del Piombo, la Ruota e molte altre: nè la cappella di Sisto, credo, riusirebbe netta.  Circa la parte fatte dal circulo di fuori, che dicono che costó centomila scudi, questo non è vero, perché con sedicimila si farebbe, rovinandolo poca cosa si perderebbe, perché le pietre fattevi e fondamenti non potrebbero venire più a proposito, e migliorerebbesi la fabbrica dugentomila scudi a trecento anni di tempo.  Questo è quanto a me pare e senza passione; perché il vincere mi sarebbe grandissima perdita.  E se potrete far intendere questo al Papa, mi farete piacere, chè non mi sento bene.]’  G . C. Argan and B. Contardi, Michelangelo Architect (Thames & Hudson: London, 1993), p.273), more plausibly, date the letter to 1546-47.

    [10] Bringing more light into Old St Peter’s was an aim of the remodelling that was proposed in the time of Nicholas V.  In the new crossing, wrote Giannozzo Manetti, “Haec parva testudo in summitate sua idcirco patens et aperta relinquebatur, ac in modum laternae apertabatur, ut lumen undique clarius et apertius per totum asatium [?] diffunderetur.” Torgil Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture, Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1958, p.358.

    [11]Rykwert et al, IV, 4, p.105; Orlandi, L’Architettura: ‘Extra urbem omnino servanda haec sint; ut patula et apertissima ad omnem circumaspectum siet; ut impeditionibus cum aquarum tum ruinarum sit libera et expeditissima; ut latrines ad insidias captandas nullae penitus latebrae, nulli secessus relinquantur;ut in eam non passim undevis aditus ad populations pateant…’.(p.305)

    [12]Rykwert et al, VIII,6, p.263; Orlandi L’Architettura: ‘Trivium et forus sola differunt amplitudine.  Pusillus nimirum est forus trivium.  Iubebat Plato ad trivium haberent spatia, ubi nutrices cum pueris interdiu convenirent essentque una.  Credo id quidem, quo et pueri validiores redderentur usu aurae liberioris, et nutrices laudis studio essent lautiores et minus, inter tot eius ipsius rei observatrices, errarent negligentia.  Certe ornamento erit et triviis et foro, si aderit elegans porticus, sub qua patres <deambulantes> considentesve aut meridient aut mutua inter se officia praestolentur.  Adde quod ludibundam et certantem spatiis laxioribus inventutem patrum praesentia ob omni lascivientis aestatis improbitate et scurrilitate deterrebit’.(pp.713-15)

    [13] De iciarchia, Book II, p.226. l.25-31

    [14] Opere Volgari a cura di Cecil Grayson, Vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1960, Cena Familiaris, p.353, l.8-11

    [15]The idea that a circular space has no hiding place is stated with regard to the amphitheatre which, Alberti believes, ‘…was originally built for the hunt; this is why they [the ancients] decided to make it round, so that the wild beast, trapped there and baited, with no corner in which to retreat, would be easier for the hunters to provoke.’ (Rykwert et al, VIII, 8, p.278); ‘Amphitheatrum venationum gratia in primis positum interpretamur, eaque de re placuisse rotunda facere, quo illic conclusa et vexata fera, cum nusquam inveniret angulum, ubi sese reciperet, promptius a concertantibus promoveretur.'(Orlandi, L’Architettura , p.749)  Was a connection to be drawn between this circular building and a centrally-planned church?  It is probably fanciful to suggest that Alberti was thinking of metaphorical heretics here (though it might be recalled that, in the 1360s, Andrea Bonaiuti, in the Spanish Chapel of S. Maria Novella in Florence, represented the conquest of herisy as a wolf hunt).  But he does conclude the passage, after describing various ways in which animals were baited, with an odd statement: ‘I have also discovered that in theatres and amphitheatres emperors used to cast apples into the crowds, and release little birds, so as to incite childish squabbles among those who grabbed them.’ (ibid.); ‘Comperio etiam in theatris atque amphitheatris solitos principes populo spargere poma et dimittere aviculas, quibus raptorum rixae pueriles excitarentur.'(Orlandi, L’Architettura , II, p.751)  He is accusing the emperors of infantilising the people.  It is possible to imagine priests doing the same thing, with different treats.  As hs been seen, there is reason to believe in Alberti’s anti-clericalism. [Ref. Laecedemonii in De familia.]

    [16] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.354, l.873-76.  See above, Darkess and Light, note 13, for references to the impropriety of solitude, the life that flees the piazza.

    [17] Momus, II, 49

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

    [19] Grayson, III, Sofrona, p.270)

    [20] Rykwert et al, VII, 13, p.229; Orlandi, L’Architettura, p. 627-629

    [21]The bogginess of the streets of Mantua was an embarrassment to the marquis Lodovico Gonzaga during the Council of 1459.  For some notices of some arrangements that he made to pave streets and squares, see, C. Vasic Vatovec, Luca Fancelli Architetto, Epistolario Gonzaghesco (Uniedit: Firenze, 1979), pp.214-22.  Argan and Contardi refer to the tradition which holds that the remodelling of the Capitoline Hill in Rome was prompted by the events of 1536, when Charles V was to be received at the capitol.  Bad weather had left the unpaved area an embarrassing quagmire.(p.252)

    [22]This point holds broadly.  It would be wrong however, just for the sake of simplicity, to neglect a subtle note that is sounded in the Urbino City View.  The half-opened door of the ‘baptistry’ implies a mystery to be penetrated.  In general, though, such thoughts have no place.  They seem to be absent from the two other most celebrated ideal city pictures, in Baltimore and Berlin.  In fact, the reclusive ‘baptistry’ stands in relation to the open piazza as does Alberti’s cella to his portico.

    [23]The figure rear right has a cornucopia and a basket of fruit on her head.  She would normally be identified simply as Plenty.  But, in company with the other Virtues who clearly represent Temperance, Justice and Fortitude, the prudential nature of good husbandry comes to mind for the fourth Virtue, and she is identifiable as Prudence.

    [24] See above, Faith and Belief, note 6.

    [25]Alberti believed that a life lived in open society would also engender the intellectual improvement of women.  He wrote, in Sofrona, :  if women ‘fosse licito non stare sedendo solitarie in casa, in ombra, ma crescere fuori in mezzo l’uso e conversazione delle persone, qual sarebbe e quanta la prudenza loro maravoglioso e incredibile.’ (G. Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti (Bardi Editore: Roma, 1971 (reprint of 1911 edition)), p.141) The metaphor is-half botanical and half-urbanistic.  There is perhaps an implication that cloistered men stand in just such need of improvement.

    [26] Poggius Bracciolini, Opera Omnia, ed. R. Fabini, Vol.I (Bottega d’Erasmo: Torino, 1964 (Facsimile of 1538 Basel edition)); see for example ‘Defensiuncula Poggii Florentini Contra Guarinum Veronensem.  Ad Franciscum Barbarum, S.D.P.’; ‘…postquam Romani imperij potesta ad unius arbitrium pervenit, cecidit mos patrius, ut parum in foro, nihil apud populum, minimum ageretur in senatu quod eloquentiam requirere videretur.'(p.371)

    [27]Poggio Bracciolini wrote one of the most famous and impassioned descriptions of the tragic spectacle of the Forum Romanum in ruins.  See, Historiae de Varietate Fortunae, quoted in The Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. & introd., J. Ross & M. McLaughlin (Penguin, 1982), p.380.

    [28]E. Panofsky (‘”Renaissance”-self-definition or self-deception?’ in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Almqvist & Wiksell: Stockholm, 1965), p.10) cites a passage from Petrarch’s Africa, in which the poet equates light with the recovery of the ancient past and darkness with the barbarian interregnum: ‘At tibi fortassis, si – quod mens sperat et optat -/Es post me victura diu, meliora superunt /Secula: non omnes veniet Letheus in annos/Iste sopor! Poterunt discussis forte tenebris/Ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes.'(Africa,  IX, l.453ff,)

    [29]Leon Battista Alberti, Opere Volgari, Vol.III, a cura di  Cecil Grayson (Laterza: Bari, 1973), Book 1, pp.36-41

    [30]ibid.: ‘Solo studia il pittore fingere quello si vede.'(p.10): ‘Nam ea solum imitari studet pictor quae sub luce videantur'(p.11).  The Latin could be translated as, ‘For the painter applies himself to the imitation only of those things which are visible in (natural) light.’

    [31]Ibid., p.8: ‘…ampla da coprire con la sua ombra tutti e’ popoli toscani…’

    [32] Orlandi, L’Architettura, VII, 5, p.559; ‘…  for you should be one people, of common feeling and common undertaking, given to religion, and preserved and defended by a single god.’ (Rykwert et al, p.199)

    [33]Rykwert et al, VII, 4, p.195; ‘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 dignissimis, quoad undevis praeclare conspicuum sit.'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, II, p.549)

    [34]See, E. Johnson, S. Andrea in Mantua: The Building History (Penn. State Univ. Press: University Park, London, 1975), Appendix II, doc.1, p.64  and Fig.12: ‘…più capace, più eterno, più degno, più lieto.’

    [35]

    [36] See above, note …

    [37]Food and fellowship are the elements of Mosaic religion here.  They survive into early Christian times.  See below, note ? (p.229).

    [38]Rykwert et al,  VIII, 7, p.268; ‘Et nostros non audeo improbare pontifices morumque magistros, si consulto spectaculorum usum prohibuere.  Moysem laudant, qui unico in templo gentem omnem suorum convenire solemnibus et commessationes statutis temporibus inter se concelebrare instituit.  Quid ego hunc spectasse aliud dixerim praeter hoc, ut vellet conciliis et communione civium mitescere animos atque ad amicitiae fructum paratiores reddere?  Sic censeo maiores nostros non magis festivitatis iocunditatisque gratia in urbibus spectacula constituisse quam utilitatis.  Et profecto, si rem diligenter pensitabimus, multa occurent, cur iterum atque iterum indoleas tam praeclarum utilemque institutum iam tum pridem obsolevisse.'(L’Architettura , II, p.725)

    [39]

    [40] See  below, note …

    [41] See text and translation above in Momus section

    [42]Rykwert et al,VIII, 7, p.268; ‘Nam […] alia ad oblectamenta pacis et ocii, alia ad studia belli et negocii …'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, II, p.725).

    [43]Rykwert et al, as above; ‘…certe ingenii mentisque vigor et vis exitatur aliturque, in altero animi viriumque robur et firmitas…'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, II, as above).

    [44]Rykwert et al, VII, 13, p.229; ‘Apud maiores nostros per illa nostrae religionis initia optimi viri in communionem coenae conveniebant, non ea re, ut corpus epulis saturum facerent, sed ut convictu mutuo mansuescerent et animo bonis monitis referti domum redirent multo cupidissimi virtutis. […] Flagrabant omnium studia ad communem omnium salutem et ad cultum virtutis.  Demum quisque, prout facultatas suppeditabat, offerebat in medium quasi pietati debitum censum et bene meritorum stipem […]  Omnia istoc pacto inter eos veluti inter amantissimos fratres erant communia. Post id tempus, cum per principes licuit publice facere, non multo quidem a vetere patrum instituto deviarunt […]  Itaque unica tum quidem erat ara, ad quam conveniebant, unicum in dies sacrificium celebraturi.  Successere haec tempora, quae utinam vir quispiam gravis, pace pontificum, reprehendenda duceret: qui, cum ipsi dignitatis tuendae gratia vix kalendis annuis potestatem populo faciant visendi sui, omnia usque adeo circumferta reddidere altaribus et interdum… non dico plus.  Hoc affirmo: apud mortales nihil inveniri, ne excogitari quidem posse, quod sit dignius sanctiusque sacrificio.  Ego vero neminem dari bene consultum puto, qui quidem velit res dignissimas nimium perprompta facilitate vilescere.'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, II, pp.627-29)

    [45]Rykwert et al, VII,5, p.199; ‘…una enim gens uno consensu et instituto religioni dicata uno erit deo tuta et munita.'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, II, p.559) [see above]

    [46]J. Shearman, “A Functional Interpretation of Villa Madama”, Römische Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Vol.XX, 1983, pp.13-27.

    [47]Another circular reception-space that might be mentioned here is in Mantegna’s house in Mantua.  See, E. Marani (& C. Perina), Mantova: Le Arti, Vol.II (Istituto Carlo d’Arco per la Storia di Mantova: Mantova, 1961), pp.47-50.

    [48]Rykwert et al, V.17, p.145; ‘…venientem hospitem honestissimis excipiet spatiis.'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, I, p.415)

    [49]Rykwert et al, V.17, p.146; ‘Omnium pars primaria ea est, quam, seu cavam aedium seu atrium putes dici, nos sinum appellabimus. […] Itaque sinus pars erit primaria, in quam caetera omnia minora membra veluti in publicum aedis forum confluant, ex quave non aditus modo commodissimus verum et luminum etiam commoditates aptissime importentur.'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, I, p.417)  Alberti connects the courtyard directly with friendship by requiring that immediately after it should come the chapel: “There should be consecrated a chapel, immediately visible, with an altar; here any guest on entry may make a pledge of friendship…’; ‘Aderitque primario obtutu religioni dicatum sacrarium cum ara propalam, quo loci ingressus hospes religionem ineat amiciciae…'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, I, p.419)  A model of good conduct applicable to clergy and secular ruler is offered here: ‘…the head of the family on his return home may pray to the gods above for peace and calm for his family; then in the vestibule he may embrace anyone who has come to greet him, and consult with friends over any decision to be made, and so on.'(as above, p.146); ‘…et domum pater familias repetens, pacem a superis et suorum tranquillitatem poscat: istoc salutantes amplexabitur; si qua erunt arbitria, de consilio pensitabit amicorum, et istiusmodi.'(as above)

    [50]C. Borroughs (From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass , London, 1990), pp. 6-7) talks of architecure and morality, or more specifically society, being, in Alberti’s view, somehow reciprocally instrumental: ‘Central in the De re aedificatoria … is a conception of an ideal urban environment that can mold human behaviour, while itself determined in important respects by the society that inhabits it.’ 

    [51] Rykwert et al. V, 9, p,131 71): ‘Adde quod , si quando aut legatos aut principes exterarum gentium sibi dari copiam senatus petierint e re publica, […] est locum habere, ubi cum dignitate et hospitis et urbis praesolantem excipias.’(Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.3

    [52] The pursuit of personal interests coincided with a decline in both morality, as is clear from Alberti’s history of Christianity above, and civilisation.  Alberti, Della famiglia, (in Opere Volgari, ed. C. Grayson (Laterza: Bari, 1960), Vol.I), p.5: ‘Vero, doppo la morte d’Alessandro Grande, subito ch’e principi macedoni cominciarono a procurare e’ suoi propri beni, e aversi solliciti non al publico imperio, ma curiosi a’ privati regni, fra loro subito nacquero discordie.  Così adunque finirono non la fortuna, ma loro stultizia e’ Macedoni la conseguita sua felicità, e trovonsi in poco tempo senza imperio e senza gloria.’  Or below: ‘Ma subito che la libidine del tiranneggiare e i singulari comodi, le ingiuste voglie in Italia più poterono che le buone legge a santissime consuete discipline, subito cominciò lo imperio latino a debilitarsi e inanire, a perdere la grazia, decore e tutte le sue pristine forze…'(7).  Michelangelo might not have subscribed to the detail of Alberti’s historical analysis, but his letter to Ferratino indicates that he shared Alberti’s thinking about self interest and morality.

    [53]The embryo of the design of the Tempietto existed by 1504, the date of Raphael’s Spozalizio, in the background of which is an arcuated building of polygonal plan which nevertheless has the same general configuration as Bramante’s building.

    [54]If the virtues of Bramante’s St. Peter’s would have been its civilised and open luminousness, it was not dissimilar to the place of public reception associated with the senate in Alberti’s thinking: ‘… in public halls … every measure must be taken to ensure that a group of citizens may be pleasantly received, decently treated while present, and conveniently dismissed; in particular make sure that there is no shortage of passages, lights open spaces, and other such facilities.’ (Rykwert et al, V,9, p.131); ‘…publicis diversoriis nihil, quod ad civium multitudinem commode excipiendam, honeste detinendam oportuneque emittendam faciat, ulla et parte negligendum est; et praesertim curandum, ut itinerum et luminum et spatiorum et eiusmodi, quae usui ventura sint, ne ullae penitus commoditates desint.'(Orlandi, L’Architettura, I, pp.371-373)

    [55] op.cit., p.246, l.1575-76.

    [56] op.cit., p.247, l.1580-1583.  He talks here of the contentions that arise in the public arena.  He should not be taken, however, to despise the piazza.

  • 3 Alberti’s Mapping Devices: lessons in Florence and projects for Rome

    The attempt to look at Alberti’s architecture beyond its material and theoretical limits is the search for an area of activity standing, in some way, between the drawing board and the building site, between the physics and metaphysics.  Alberti attempted to characterise this somewhat mysterious zone by means of a joke in his treatise, De pictura (1435) 

    Underlying the painter’s art, he showed, was drawing.  Drawing was equally indispensible to the architect.[1]  Its points and lines, with their power to generate planes and bodies, are, at the same time, the essential objects of the pure geometer, who, of course, deals with no-dimensional points and one-dimensional lines.  Being impossible things, outside of the minds of geometers going about their business of logical demonstration, these objects needed, when they came into the hands of painters and draughtsmen, a corporeal way of manifesting themselves.  Alberti said that he would employ ‘una più grassa Minerva.’[2]  The goddess of wisdom, usually as bony as an axiom, would, for Alberti, put on a bit of flesh.  Whereas Hamlet would regret his imprisonment in matter and plead for annihilation as his means of escape, Alberti shrugged at the histrionics of Platonism.  The draughtsman would mark the sheet with one-dimensional points and two-dimensional lines (at the least).  The performance would be Falstaffian.  Alberti was interested in the mathematical nature of things and in practical mathematical tools for making and describing things.[3]

    The term ‘mapping’ is used here as a sort of net in which to gather a variety of devices and procedures that were developed in the first half of the fifteenth century for establishing the mathematical nature of things, namely their quantity, quality and place.  They comprise a family whose relations are sometimes close and sometimes distant, even mysterious.  The circumstances of their invention – born out of necessity or else accompanied by the cry of Eureka – and their mathematical nature hold out the possibility of reconstructing a part of the rational life of their inventors.

    The architectural undertaking that most had called for new devices to see it through to success was the dome of Florence Cathedral.(fig)  Alberti is to be pictured as the ruminative observer of the scene, and the building came to preside, as a golden thread in his thought.  The project had acted almost like a lively research laboratory’s common room – except that the conversation seems to have been led pretty well exclusively by the research professor, Filippo Brunelleschi, the cupola’s ‘inventor et gubernator’.[4]  Before he had conceived the solution to the problem of vaulting the octagon at the east end of the building, it had become clear that the skills and methods of the artisan tradition were inadequate to the task.  The identification and analysis of problems and the invention of new solutions became essential to the building process.[5]  When Brunelleschi succeeded in persuading the officials of the Cathedral Works that the dome could be built without centering, he presented a completed concept; but he had not reached a stage where the execution of the work would be automatic.[6]  Machinery – material and rational – remained to be developed and then applied.

    It is a curiosity of the dome project that it –observably- grew.  Whereas, in conventional building, a centering is a pre-existing form or external rule dictating the assembly of parts, the absence of a centering in this case required that the rising dome contain or possess a regulatory principle that was coincident with the material and with the moments in time through which the construction would pass.  That principle in the natural world is of organic growth.  There may be a point of arrival in the future; but, as time-lapse photography makes clear to us, the observation of growth prompts an awareness of events in the present tense, and the end is, in the meantime, concealed.   In the case of the dome, the spectacle must have been astounding.  It marched without crutches to a destination that seemed unknown.

    However, the growth only looked like a process of Nature: the structure was a work of art in fact, and the principle of its growth had to contain a teleology.  The dome needed to rise on specific trajectories, to arrive at another, smaller octagon, mathematically precise, and just twice as high as the span of the space.  There could be no deviation or error.  In other words, the dome could not in fact dispense with a centering.  That centering just had to have, instead of a material actuality as a timber formwork, a rational existence and function – an immaterial reality.  Historians have speculated on the nature of the device or devices that regulated the progress or flight.

    In particular, they have conceived various pieces of apparatus involving cords and wires.[7]  The prompting to do so comes partly from the famous drawing, made by Giovanni di Gherardo da Prato, whose accompanying text accuses Brunelleschi of deviating from the arch profile that capomaestri where sworn to follow, and which shows the method for constructing the ‘Quinto Acuto’ or ‘Pointed Fifth’ arch.(fig)[8]  It is a matter of striking arcs; of stretching chords or wires.

    Another encouragement to conceive the use of an arc-striking apparatus is Alberti’s instruction, in De re aedificatoria, on how to create domes without centerings.[9]  A rod is pivoted at the centre of the springing plane of the dome, its other end touching and therefore locating all the bricks of the construction, in Antonio Manetti’s account of Brunelleschi’s Ridolfi Chapel in San Jacopo sopr’Arno.[10]

    Of course, the dome of Florence Cathedral does not have a single radius, either in plan or in elevation, and so Alberti’s method is not applicable to the case.[11]  Distances of the various parts of the fabric from the axis are multitudinous.  It is therefore necessary to conceive something more complicated than the device described by Manetti and Alberti.  But, in fact, all such devices have the problem that they must be made of material that will either stretch or sag when rigged up beneath the rising dome.  They become mathematically imprecise and therefore incompetent to regulate construction with accuracy.

    Another device is documented, however.  It was one which, when properly considered, can be seen to be capable of accurate regulation.  Giovanni Battista Gelli (1498-1563) stated that Brunelleschi had had flattened an area on the bank of the Arno, and there made a 1:1 drawing of the dome.[12]  Gelli was telling a hundred-year-old story that is not otherwise corroborated.  But it has the ring of truth, mostly because – if some tricky reasoning be allowed – so useful would it have been for the project, so much must its non-existence have been an impediment to building.  It is instructive to consider how the drawing may have worked, the problems it solved and the inspiration that it provided.

    A first problem that the drawing could have solved might have been very practical.  Lodges could have been set up in the vicinity and component parts of the structure could have been made there, before delivery on site.  As a place of assembly more than manufacture, the building site would have borne some resemblance to that of Solomon’s Temple. The First Book of Kings 6:7 reports, ‘And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither: so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building.’

    The drawing would have had a more direct role in regulating the dome-construction mathematically.  An axis is an origin of radii at rising levels.  The axis of the dome is located in relation to the material structure according to mathematical rules both in elevation and plan.  But the radius is not fixed in either plane.  In plan, the length of the radius oscillates as it passes now along the long diameter of the octagon and now along the short.  In elevation, it increases (according to the rule of the Pointed Fifth) as it rises.  Therefore, because such a multitude of radii are present in the dome, cords or wires cannot act the part of radii in a simple and convenient way.[13]  Brunelleschi, in order to regulate the growth of the dome, had to find a way of escaping the magnetic authority of the axis of the dome.

    The 1:1 drawing, if the indicative voice may be allowed, enabled him to do this.[14]  It is a copy of the situation of the dome, with the problems of the material world, like gravity (that makes wires sag), removed.  To be useful, it would have to contain all the mathematical facts of the built dome itself: so it is sensible to conceive the drawing as a plan and elevation. There, every mathematical point can easily be located with reference to the axis, and any two points are at a distance that is to recur in the actual dome.  As will be seen, back at the building-site itself, all that survived of the mathematical definition of the form was the point on the pavement where the immaterial axis emerged and rose into thin air, and an orientation of the octagon with regard to some pole, like a point of the compass.  For ease of understanding, though without the insistence that this is just what Brunelleschi did, let there be marked out on the pavement, centred on the axis point, a set of radial lines, as many as may be required.

    At the drawing, a point is a certain distance from the line representing the pavement of the octagon; it is a certain distance from the centre, and it has a certain ‘compass’ bearing.   A plumb line and a linear measure are all that are required for the corresponding point to be found in the actual dome.  If a point in the actual structure corresponds with the data for that point generated in the drawing, all is well.  Any distance from one point to another in the drawing, where both refer to points within the material structure can be measured upon the material structure and the accuracy of the building process can be checked.  Except vertically, there need be no measurements taken across the void.  It is not important for present purposes that the drawing can also be used to other ends, like the production of templates.  The prime importance of the drawing is that it allows the location of all points of the structure to be determined with regard to the crucial axis, but without the axis needing to have a functional presence at the building site itself.  There is no need for spiders’ webs and tangles of wires.

    This is both obvious and remarkable.  The drawing, which is literally elsewhere from the Cathedral, informed it, and can be said in a certain sense to occupy it.  Or, to put the matter another way, the data can be thought of as inhabiting the present building and, therefore in a ghostly way, to have been there first.  The dome was predicted by ratio. 

    The drawing seems to have continued to inspire Brunelleschi, for basically the same mathematical procedure was performed by the Castello.(fig)  The crane that he invented for placing heavy components of the dome, the Castello located their destination in the same way as points on the dome had been verified by plumb line, measure and compass.  The jib revolved, the hook ran out or in along the jib, and the weight could be raised or lowered.  The Castello, then, is attached to an invisible but ineluctable mathematical container – a virtual cylinder – within which any point has three identifiable coordinates, two linear and one radial.

    Alberti seems to have understood Brunelleschi’s devices. In his treatise, De statua, he invented for the sculptor three of his own, that seem to have emerged from a meditation upon Brunelleschi’s mathematical definition of the cupola.  The first two were devices for finding the absolute sizes of things.  First was the Exempeda –a ruler with six divisions.  The whole length was taken from the figure to be measured, so that the six feet were relative to the thing rather than absolute. The second were the Normae Mobiles.  There were, in effect, a set of callipers, able to measure everything with solid extension in the thing to be sculpted (Alberti let it be a human figure).  His refinement of what was presumably an omnipresent tool in the sculptor’s workshop was that it provided sizes that could be read off directly in whatever unit of measure the sculptor had chosen.  Callipers took sizes, not measures.  The device consisted of two set-squares confronting one another, their bases aligned.  The vertical elements, measuring the width that was to be known, approach and withdraw as necessary along a slide.  The Normae Mobiles are an inversion of the simple ruler, since they measures where the void stops rather than starts.  Whereas the ordinary ruler, as-it-were adds up the units of extension of a thing until the extension ceases, the Normae Mobiles search for the start of the thing’s extension, at both ends.  Alberti’s concept of finitio, one of the mathematical definers of things in De re aedificatoria, along with numerus (quantity) and collocatio (place) seems to have some association with the action of his Normae Mobiles.[15]  In De statua, Alberti used the callipers to produce his table of sizes of the ideal man.  In other words, insofar as the man’s definition is mathematical, the basis of all proportional relationships is to found in the data supplied by the Normae Mobiles and the Exempeda .  It is important not to over-state the parallel between the devices of Brunelleschi and Alberti, but the Normae Mobiles and Exempeda  – or rather, the table of sizes – does have a certain resemblance to Brunelleschi’s 1:1 drawing.  Both stand aside from the complications of the material case, gathering together all data in mathematical form.

    The third device was the Finitorium.[16] It is strikingly similar in its operation to Brunelleschi’s Castello.(fig)  And, as the Castello re-enacts the regulatory procedure of the 1:1 drawing, it is like that too.  The job of the Finitorium is to allow the specification of points on the surface of a statue in an active pose.  So, for example, because he is an orator, the figure raises his hand.  The sculptor wants to replicate the position in space of the orator’s finger-end in the statue that he is making.  Alberti sets a disc, which he called the orizon or horizon, with a calibrated circumference upon the head of the statue.  One end of a calibrated ruler is fixed at its centre, and the other end may rotate.  From the end of the ruler hangs a calibrated plumb line.  The system is the same as Brunelleschi’s crane.  The disc is given the equivalent of a compass setting.  The ruler is rotated until it is vertically above the finger-end of the orator, and a reading is taken from the calibrated circumference of the disc to register the orientation.  The plumb line is then hung from the ruler, touching the finger end.  From the calibrations of the ruler is taken the distance from the centre of the disc (and the axis of the statue) and from the calibrations of the plumb line is calculated the height to which the finger is raised.  The Castello located its loads in the same way.  Indeed, the operator ideally could have been given the orientation and the plane and vertical distances – a purely mathematical set of data- and could have placed the stone.  The Horizon, rule and line navigate the same sort of virtual cylinder that the Castello masters.

    Alberti has designed – for the figure that can be disposed in any way in space – a cylindrical matrix allowing any point to be given three coordinates.  Brunelleschi’s 1:1 drawing had done the same thing for the dome.  It seems likely that Alberti took the lesson of Brunelleschi’s inventions, or else – less likely, in view of the great impression that the dome made upon Alberti [17] – they derived their procedures from a common source.[18] Alberti was in the entourage of Pope Eugenius IV, exiled from Rome and housed in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, from 1434 until 1436 when, immediately after the dedication of the finished dome, he accompanied the Pope to Bologna.  Eugenius at length returned to Rome, in 1443.  In the years immediately following, Alberti used the Horizon and rotating ruler of his Finitorium in a somewhat different way and to a different purpose.  He produced the data of the Descriptio Urbis Romae.[19]

    Alberti supplies to the reader the mathematical means to draw a map of Rome.(fig)  His reader in Paris will make an identical version to his twin in Florence (though they are allowed to differ the scale).  Both prepare a disc on which the map will be drawn.  It is calibrated in a similar way to the Horizon in De statua.[20]  So too is a ruler, one end of which is to be set at the centre of the disc, while the other rotates.  ‘Zero’ on the circumference gives the compass orientation and ‘zero’ on the ruler marks the centre.  Any point on the plane of the disc can be denominated by an orientation and a distance from the centre.  Alberti then supplies these two coordinates (radial and linear) for prominent structures of Rome, seen from the Capitol (point ‘zero’ of the city), in the form of a table.  The calibrations of the disc and ruler correspond with those of the table. A drawing surface will be marked with a centre and the same radial directions of the landmarks.

    The locations of Rome’s landmarks in the radial table were easy to establish.  The disc and ruler were simply used as a viewing device positioned at the Capitol itself -probably the tower of the Palazzo dei Senatori.  The other table – of distances of landmarks from the centre – was put together by means that Alberti does not explain.  He probably did something similar to what follows.  He had first to make his calibrated ruler represent a certain number of cubits.  As he says in the text, the distance from the Capitol to the city walls is never more than 6,140 cubits.  He then finds two landmarks that are visible from the Capitol and whose distance apart can be measured on the ground, that is, without estimation.  He registers their radial locations before taking his disc and ruler to one of them, where he registers the radial locations of the Capitol and the third landmark.  The line that passes from the second to the third landmark is of a known length.  Returning to his drawing surface, he maintains the angle on the third landmark and shifts the line until it touches the radial coming from the Capitol, Alberti has one distance and three angles.  He can now calculate the distances of the landmarks from the Capitol.  One of them, equally commanding and perhaps of equal use for map-makers, was to have been the Torre di Niccolo, by the Vatican Palace.  However, it did not reach its intended height.[21]

    Any number of maps had been made of Rome before Alberti’s; but they differed from his in that they showed the architectural or pious contents of the city distributed with a rough indication of their orientation to one another. Taddeo di Bartolo’s fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, of 1414, is an example of this sort of map.(fig)  Interestingly, Taddeo di Bartolo set the tower of the Palazzo dei Senatori on the vertical bisector of his map, and just a little above the horizontal bisector.  Maps like Taddeo’s were clearly sufficient to their purpose.  Rather as with Portolan maps, one knew in which direction to strike out; but one did not know how far off was one’s goal.  The same sort of clarity about direction but imprecision about distance within picture space marks the sort of perspective that Giotto used.  Alberti’s map, however, stands in relation to the city conceived mathematically, as a set of orientations and distances.  It resembles very much Brunelleschi’s 1:1 drawing in its relation to the dome.  Even as a set of numerical data, it resembles Brunelleschi’s drawing.  What was written upon the scrap of paper that the apprentice received from the surveyor by the Arno and shinned up to the top of the dome with was like a fragment torn from Alberti’s table in Descriptio urbis Romae (minus one coordinate).  Because the subsequent history of map-making has continued very largely to be concerned with scaling down actual distances, it is easy to overlook how novel it was for Alberti’s system to relegate the established motives for map-making in favour of the establishment of things in exclusively mathematical terms.  Once done, other strictly mathematical matrices could be laid on top of the drawing made according to the data.  For example, it would be possible to lay a pavement like that of the costruzione legittima on top, and the map would have grid-references.  Alberti’s map, supplying distances, would have given its first users a wonderful sense of the completeness of their rational understanding.  There would even dawn a sense of the dimension of time as a function of space, for they could now make an estimation of how long it would take to reach their goal.

    Alberti’s purpose in making the map – and in the form that he did it – was partly to conduct a conversation with like-minded people on the subject of communication.  As Mario Carpo observes, by providing the map in digital form, Alberti avoided the problem that belongs to the conventional drawing – that the copy’s accuracy depends upon the skill of its maker.[22]  Undeviatingly accurate drawings could be produced anywhere and at any time by persons without skill.  Again, the situation of the dome project was similar.  The data that the apprentice carried demanded no interpretative skill of the masters at either end of the journey.

    A further purpose in making the map of Rome is to be connected with its form as a drawing.  It could be an aid to planning.  At ground level, Rome was, famously, a scene of dereliction and confusion.  Alberti’s friend and fellow Papal Abbreviator, Poggio Bracciolini wrote a description in De varietate fortunae (1431-) that is vivid and celebrated: ‘…when I first  … went to Rome, almost nothing was left of that old Rome but an outline or an image, and only the ruins bore witness to its bygone greatness…’[23][put in more] Improvement, which was a pressing need and had been begun by Martin V after his return to the city in 1420 continued under Eugenius IV and Nicholas V.  An obstacle to it was the shere obstructive shambles of the place.  Among the various instruments needed for the task of improvement, to combine with a policy and a programme of actions, was a wider perspective upon the scene than that offered in reality.  An accurate map was required.  In particular, it was needed at an office that had been rescuscitated and empowered by Martin V, that of the magistri viarum.  These officials were sanctioned to clear obstacles to circulation and communication within Rome.  Provided with a map, they could see, at a glance, the implication of the removal or retention of any structure.  Without such an instrument, their determinations were tainted by arbitrariness. 

    The use of a device to direct a path irrespective of obstacles is made the clearer where Alberti dealt with tunnelling for water supply in Book X, Chapter 7 of De re aedificatoria.  A modified version of the device is described.  A ten-foot diameter platform is made on the top of the hill to be tunnelled: ‘…is circulus orizon nuncupatur.’  A sighting pole is set at the centre.  A diameter is drawn to align with the water-course as it will enter and exit the tunnel to be cut.  If the tunnel is not to pass under the centre of the orizon,  sightings of the entrance and the exit are taken and the corresponding diameters are drawn.  A line drawn between the corresponding points of each diameter gives the direction of the tunnel.  Alberti concludes the description by saying that he also uses this method for drawing and painting towns and regions: ‘Nos circuli istius adminiculo ad urbium provinciarumque descriptionem annotandam [sp.? Check. Why? Looks right] atque pingendam…”.[24]

    Alberti was, of course, much concerned with the restoration of Rome.  His treatise, De re aedificatoria, as well as a book of general information, advice and advocacy, can be considered an attempt to shape the moral, social, formal and historic project.  He presented a version, in 1452, to Nicholas V, the pope who, according to Gianozzo Manetti, his secretary and biographer, put together a systematic and comprehensive five-part programme for the restoration of the city (and especially the Vatican area).[25]  Assuming that he read Alberti’s treatise, a passage in the prologue would have been a strong incentive to Nicholas to make the city fit for the institution of which was head.

    Quantum veri auctoritati imperii et nominis Latini contulerit aedificatio, nihil plus dico quam nos ex his bustis et residuis veteris magnificentiae, quae passim videmus, multa historicis credere didicisse, quae alioquin fortasse minus credibilia videbantur.[26]

    The fragility of authority and reputation are the clearer to apprehend when the fabric is ruinous.  At the same time, material remains prevent tales from being merely fabulous.

    Alberti included in De re aedificatoria an account of the works that he did to stabilise St Peter’s.[27]  It is probably an addendum to the text of 1452.  Others involved in giving shape to the programme would include Poggio Bracciolini who, as has been seen, attempted to identify the causes of the catastrophe for the city – in effect, a diagnosis of its ills, and a pointer to the needful therapy.  It was he who had found the copy of Vitruvius, at St Gall in Switzerland, that Alberti studied and believed needed an up-dating in the form of his own De re aedificatoria.  Flavio Biondo, who dedicated Roma Instraurata to Eugenius in 1444-46, was another member of the group.[28]  Manetti’s extensive account of Nicholas’s plans for Rome suggests that he too took a close interest in the project.  Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae should be seen as another contribution to the groundwork that was needed in preparation for the restoration.[29]  As has been seen in De re aedificatoria, Book X Chapter 7, he describes the use of the same mapping device combined with a surveyor’s pole set in the centre to direct tunnelling.[30]  It was evidently possible to draw lines with obstacles in the way.

    The pope who exploited Alberti’s map of Rome most assiduously and effectively, or else the succeeding maps that Alberti’s made possible, was Julius II.  However, it is very possible that Julius simply enacted a plan of action that was conceived earlier.[31]  The via Giulia is a straight street, passing all the way from the Lungotevere opposite the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in the Vatican district, to the Ponte Sisto.(fig)  The previous via del Pellegrino took the same route by a meandering path taking in the Campo dei Fiori.  The Ponte Sisto itself connects Trastevere with the fifteenth-century abitato – the part of medieval Rome that snuggles in the bend of the river south of the Vatican quarter.  Though Julius gave his name to the connecting street, it seems unlikely that Sixtus built the bridge without thought to improved communication with the Vatican, namely the connection that his nephew, Julius, made and called the via Giulia.  The bridge serves as an emblem for his public works in general (as well as his role as pontifex) on the reverse of the medal, by the sculptor who called himself Lysippus, showing the bridge and bearing the inscription CURA RERUM PUBLICARUM.(figs)[32]  The plaque on the bridge states…[Get]  The argument that Julius did not feel a compunction to honour the street joining the Vatican and the Ponte Sisto with the name via Sisto can be extended.  Sixtus, who claimed to be the founder of the Vatican Library through the inscription of the fresco by Melozzo da Forlì, now in the Pinacoteca, and indeed the whole project of Nicholas including the restoration of the acqua virginis, could name the bridge after himself without being the first to conceive it, and could have intended the cutting of the Via Giulia (and via Lungara) too.  Flatterers of Sixtus as a new Augustus in having found the city of brick and left it of marble could similarly be transposing an undertaking that Alberti originally intended for Nicholas.[33]

    Alberti, in De re aedificatoria, Book IV, 3, makes the point that a city divided by geographical features more easily descends into factionalism. As sure a sign of ancient Rome’s social collapse as the delapidation of the acqueducts supplying water to a healthy populace was that of its political disintegration – the ruination of the bridges across the Tiber.  The repair of the old bridges promises a true restauracio, the undoing of a division.

    Given the nature of the thinking that conceived the Ponte Sisto and the via Giulia and, indeed, the straight street that Julius opened on the Vatican side of the river going southwest to Trastevere, the via della Lungara, it is possible that both Sixtus and Julius were inheritors of an earlier scheme for improved circulation between the Vatican, the abitato and Trastevere.  A Ponte Niccolo and a via Niccolo instead of the Ponte Sisto and the via Giulia would be consistent with other planning actions proposed by Nicholas V.[34]  A straight via Niccolo would have the virtue of the three streets that were to pass from from the Castel Sant’ Angelo to the Platea Sancti Petri.   It would be to imitate the ancient Romans to drive straight streets: they were famous for them.  The via Appia is a famous local example.  As Alberti wrote in De re aedificatoria, ‘…si erit civitas clara et praepotens, vias habere directas amplissimas condecet, quae ad dignitatem maiestatemque urbis faciant.’[35]

    Nicholas’ five-point plan could not be realised within the period of a papacy of even a relatively youthful pope.  But one part of his project for Rome and the Vatican did receive especial attention.  The works done in connection with the Ponte Sant’Angelo were in immediate response to the disaster that happened there in Jubilee Year, 1450.  The throng of pilgrims crossing the bridge had been so great that a parapet had given way and many died by drowning.  Nicholas had the Piazza S. Celso opened on the south side of the bridge, presumably so that human traffic across the bridge could be controlled and the transit be made safe.  Two chapels were also created, one dedicated to the Magdalen and the other, the Holy Innocents.  Nicholas was clearly concerned by a problem of transit and circulation here, and the thought emerges that these actions, if limited to the Ponte Sant’Angelo and its immediate surroundings, are more a tactical response than a strategic one.  In other words, another bridge would have done much to ease congestion, especially if it were one-way, allowing pilgrims to return to their lodgings from the Vatican enclave.  In his account of the disaster at the bridge in 1450, Giannozzo Manetti includes the point that it took two-way traffic: ‘tramite hinc ibatur redibaturque.’[36] The Ponte Sant’Angelo was conceived by Nicholas, as it was more explicitly by Bernini when he added the angels carrying the Instruments of the Passion, as an approach to the Vatican, rather than its exit.  The key indicator of Nicholas’ thinking was his building of the keep atop the Castel Sant’Angelo and the placing there of a statue of the Archangel Michael.[37]  The pilgrim is to think of the bridge as the approach to the Throne of Judgement, before which St Michael weighs the souls of the dead.  The sinner had the penitential Magdalen in mind and hope in innocence.  Nowadays, the pilgrim crosses the bridge and passes across the front of the building.  As conceived in the fifteenth century, the pilgrim passed between two towers buttressing the bridge at the north end.  The medal which commemorates the restoration of Alexander VI (1493-1503) shows the arrangement from the south.(fig)  In conventional church architecture, where the Last Judgement is depicted on the west wall, the main door gives the access that the Ponte Sant’Angelo does for the Vatican.  The tympanum above the door of medieval churches frequently carried representations of the drama of the Last Judgement, as happens here.  It is in the context of this progress for pilgrims that the atrium of the church of St Peter’s was the Paradisum.[38] The recognition of Nicholas’s work around the Ponte Sant’Angelo as a species of preaching en promenade makes the bridge emphatically an approach to the Vatican and increases the need for an exit.[39]

    The via della Lungara provides such a route, a direct journey to Trastevere and, by the Ponte Sisto, back to the abitato.  This system of circulation (to be operated when the numbers of pilgrims was high) supposes a counter-clockwise direction.  In other words, traffic along the via della Lungara would be in the direction of Trastevere.  People lodging in Trastevere and wanting to go to the shrine of St Peter, would pass across the Ponte Sisto and towards the Ponte Sant’ Angelo.  Controlling traffic where the via della Lungara arrives at Trastevere is the Porta Settimiana, an opening made in the Aurelian Walls.  Alexander VI built the gate in 1498.  However, a gate of some sort has to have been conceived at the same time as the via della Lungara.  Interestingly, the Porta Settimiana is crenellated on the Trastevere side – the better perhaps to dissuade people from using it as an exit, when the Ponte Sisto was to fulfil that function.

    If there is no pressing reason to insist that the via della Lungara and the Ponte Sisto were conceived exclusively by Julius and Sixtus, there is reason to suggest that Nicholas’ plan included their provision.  Indeed, the speculation also insists that the plan was more elaborate.  A bridge was to pass, as early as 1450, from the east end of Borgo Santo Spirito to connect with the anticipated via Giulia.  In other words, the aim was the rebuilding of the ancient Pons Vaticanus, Neronianus or Triumphalis whose piers are shown in, for example, the Bufalini Map on 1551 and which is labelled in the Alessandro Strozzi map of 1474.(fig). [40] The plan of Nicholas, Sixtus or Julius did not come to fruition at this point, for the via Giulia, that had begun its way northwards so purposively, ends in a rather sad dead end at the Lungotevere dei Fiorentini, unconnected directly to the Ospedale di Santo Spirito and the rest of the Vatican opposite.

    The plan, then, was for a forecourt to the Ponte Sant’Angelo, a piazza on the west side of the Castel Sant’Angelo, three porticoed streets, as described by Giannozzo Manetti, passing up to the Piazza San Pietro,[41] the rebuilding of the Ponte Triumphalis at the end of Borgo Santo Spirito, the cutting of the via Giulia, the building of the Ponte Sisto and the creation of the via della Lungara connecting the Vatican (along via dei Penitenzieri) and Trastevere directly.

    Alberti’s particular interest in the Ponte Sant’ Angelo is documented.  He wrote about it in particularly warm terms in De re aedificatoria.[42]  Vasari believed that he possessed a drawing by Alberti of the bridge.[43]

    The dilapidated condition of the city presented especial difficulties for the creation of the straight street through the abitato, namely the via Giulia.  That is, it did so, until an accurate map of the city had been made.  This is the practical use to which Alberti’s map is most adapted.[44] Before his map, it was impossible for the magistri viarum to take true command in the pursuit of their task; they could not cut straight streets through the medieval city, because they could not predict with confidence their mathematical-geographical destinations.  But, just as it had been possible to use the distance between any two points on the 1:1 drawing of the dome of Florence Cathedral to check the accuracy of the rising structure, so it was now possible, in Rome, to demolish in a straight line between the Ponte Triumphalis and the Ponte Sisto, when the political and economic obstacles became surmountablee.[45]

    There is reason to link the planning of a scheme to connect parts of Rome by straight roads and bridges with Alberti because he had designed the device which allowed straight streets to be created in Rome.  The connection could however be loose; others could have made use of his map.  But it can be argued that his map was invented precisely to solve the problem of how to cut such streets.  If the various data are gathered together, they comprise a body of evidence that he was ambitious to provide a programme and a plan for the city.  Others, also interested in Rome’s restoration and no doubt contributors in the framing of the policy and programme, did not invent the facilitating device.  Historians have noted the circumstantial evidence of Alberti’s contribution to the restoration of Rome and particular works of restoration, like St Peter’s and S. Stefano Rotondo, are direct evidence of his involvement.[46] However, a role much closer to the heart of planning is indicated when Alberti’s debt to Brunelleschi as a mathematical thinker is taken into consideration.  Moreover, his post-mortem presence in the city becomes extended, if Sixtus and Julius became his urbanistic cats-paws.  In light of this thinking, the crucial moment in Rome’s renaissance was indeed around 1450 when Nicholas was pope.  Or else it was around thirty years earlier, when the predictive power of drawing revealed itself; when representation, liberated from necessity – being an a posteriori action – became thought, and able to create the world in its image.

    —————–

    The 1:1 drawing for the dome of Florence Cathedral seems to have stimulated Alberti to ponder and to develop his mathematical powers of invention as a putative sculptor and infrastructural restorer of Rome.  His most famous invention, however, is to be related prima facie with another of Brunelleschi’s mathematical inventions.  Alberti’s instruction in the first book of De pictura in how the reader might make a pavement in one-point perspective for the later assembly of scenery and cast and the performance of an affecting and morally-improving drama – the historia – is generally agreed to be a codification, for the use of painters, of the practice invented by Brunelleschi and demonstrated in his panel of the Florence Baptistry. 

    Antonio Manetti gives a brilliantly lucid account of the panel in the Biography.[47]  It is clear that Brunelleschi demonstrated, crucially, that a picture of the Baptistry was indistinguishable from the real building by an observer located at the geometrical point in space from which all surveying triangulation for the making of the picture had been done, in fact or notionally.  Earlier geometric perspectives had allowed varying amounts and kinds of movement to the observer.  The price paid for that freedom was that the relative sizes of the parts of the object depicted could not be derived from the representation.  Brunelleschi’s demonstration saw the representation containing, in a form encoded by his method of projection, all the sizes that belonged to the object itself. 

    A document of 1413 shows that Brunelleschi had already demonstrated his skill as a perspectivalist.[48]  It has been taken by some as evidence that he had developed his one-point perspective system by this time.  However, there was no very special prompting before that date for Brunelleschi to have made the invention.[49] It would be a point demonstrated to no great purpose.  The panel that Manetti describes, however, makes two points emphatically and, if a later date be allowed – after about 1420 for instance – it can be conceived as having emerged out of Brunelleschi’s struggle with a specific problem.  The geometrical point is connected with the remarkable possibility of a true Plinyesque conundrum, the inability to tell the pictured from the real.[50]

    The venerable Baptistry could be used to demonstrate the system; however, the use for which the system was designed was not the representation of buildings that had stood for hundreds of years.  There was another building whose real relational sizes called to be represented, in the knowledge that these relations were true to the actual sizes of the structure.  That was the Cathedral dome.  The problem remained one of trajectory, the need to direct the form of the building in the absence of the brute prediction of centering.  There needed to be an invisible building, standing upon the drum, with which the materials of the structure were going to have to coincide.  If Brunelleschi could make that invisible dome visible, he had the means – in theory at least – to regulate the rising building.  The observer of the Baptistry, standing at the required spot in the doorway of the Cathedral, was looking through a hole in Brunelleschi’s panel.  The painted image faced the Baptistry so that, when the observer obstructed the view of the building with a mirror, the reflected painted image coincided perfectly with what was visible an instant before.(fig)  The viewing position in its three coordinates had to be just so, as did the distance of the mirror from the panel.  A painting of the dome to be built, represented from a particular point in space, would, come its completion in 1436, be indistinguishable from the real thing.  In the meantime, life must imitate art, and, in its location, no brick or tile of the building must fail to match the picture.[51]  It is difficult to conceive a better moment than standing in admiration of the dome of Florence Cathedral with, in one’s hand the perspective drawing that predicted it, to observe that this ‘…building is a form of body, which like any other consists of lineaments and matter.’[52]

    The 1:1 drawing of the dome had had a shortcoming.  It made checking the accuracy of what had already been done easy.  But, on its own, it did now tell the actual fabric in which direction to grow.  In practice, Brunelleschi probably rigged up lengths of template to guide construction in the immediate future and these would be derived from the drawing –they could also account for irregularities in the fabric.  However, one-point perspective renderings have the virtue that the 1:I drawing lacks; they are distant from the actual structure in a different sense.  By virtue of the measured nature of viewing distance between projection point and panel and projection point and structure, they can be superimposed as visual experiences upon the visual experience of the dome.  Thus, the growing structure and its destination in space coincide as the observer shifts back and forth between experience of the building and of the perspective rendering.

    As a device for regulating the growth of the dome, the perspective probably worked better in theory than in practice.  But, in theory, three pictures would have been made, from different points of view at measurable distances from the building.  All would have had holes in them corresponding to the viewpoint or projection point and all would have used mirrors.  Each observer could verify the correctness of an alignment from his point of view.  If all three were in agreement –could wave their green flags as opposed to their red- the element would be in the correct position in space.

    A convenient spot from which to observe the building process and to set up the predictive representation of it might have been the top of the campanile.  It is possible to imagine also an activity of observation and calibration like that we conceive, of Alberti, atop the tower of the Palazzo dei Senatori, collecting the data of his Descriptio urbis Romae.

    Manetti’s description of Brunelleschi’s Baptistry panel is based on direct experience: he says that he has had it in his hands many times.[53] However, from his account, it does not appear that he took it along to the Cathedral to check its accuracy.  He would not, therefore, have proved the role of the mirror and would be reporting what he was told about it.  It seems unlikely that Alberti, an admirer of Brunelleschi, and of the dome, an inventor of perspective demonstrations and of the costruzione legittima in De pictura was in ignorance of it.  However, his own perspective method – if it did depend upon Brunelleschi’s demonstration panel, was separated from it by a considerable procedural gap.  A free translation rather than a transliteration had taken place.  Indeed, Alberti’s method, if derived from Brunelleschi’s, would have been a radical abstraction.  A speculative reconstruction of Alberti’s thinking, whereby he performed that mutation, would be somewhat attenuated.

    In any case, the invention in whose production there are very many fewer problematic steps, the 1:1 drawing, can also be argued to have had a role in enabling Alberti to develop his one-point perspective method.  The Baptistry demonstration, it has been suggested, presented an empirical order of events -there is a Baptistry of which there is a representation- in order to explain a speculative order of events – there is a drawing of which there will be a dome.  The speculative order of events was contained in the relationship of the 1:1 drawing and the material dome that was to be built.  Alberti, in conceiving the costruzione legittima, could fruitfully ponder the 1:1 drawing.

    The mechanics of Giovanni di Gherardo da Prato’s action in making the drawing of the quinto acuto, and our sense of the authority of the architectural drawing in general, make it easy for us to think that the requirement at the dome project was for a scaled-up version of the draughtsman’s instruments.  So, there would be needed some sort of rig whereby a fixed point in space could be set, from which the arcs of the structure could be struck.  However, wires and cords do not make straight lines in real space –even more so in a space as vast as that of the Florence Cathedral octagon.  More difficult, but perhaps more fruitful, is to think that a suitable regulatory apparatus would not mimic the action of the architect at the drawing board.

    Better perhaps to focus upon another device that was needed – one to establish that a given point in the material structure is where it needed to be.  Brunelleschi’s Castello and Alberti’s Orizonte did that.  Every point in the building and on the surface of the statue, as has been seen, is indicated in terms of two lengths and an orientation.  Students of the Dome project who think of the gualandrino a tre cordi as a means of controlling the arcs of the vault are conceiving a device in terms of orientations.[note ref. gualandrino)

    However, Alberti describes another device that specified points  in terms of three lengths.  His costruzione legittima created a pavement.  Any point on it was located in relation to two lengths, orthogonal and transversal.  It was  a two-dimensional ruler.  And, in the practice of the painter, it was a three-dimensional one too, for heights were easy to fix.  The cylinder of the Orizonte is replaced by the reticulated box.  The gualandrino is notable for being a diminutive and for its tre cordi.  Perhaps it was not some great apparatus of wires and cords.  Its three cords perhaps passed off as-it-were on z, y and z axes, again within a notional reticulated box.  It would be set up at any point in the structure of the dome or, on a pole, as the target for the next part of the structure.  And its three coordinates could be set.  Of course, it must be confessed that this apparatus is not without its weakness.  The two cordi in the horizontal plane would still sag.  But they do so in a more controllable way than where tracing paths from the horizontal to the vertical.  They could be referred back to the 1:1 drawing.  Alberti’s costruzione legittima could have evolved out of his understanding of such a role for the gualandrino a tre cordi, as his Orizonte did from the Castello. [this, though it makes sense, is perhaps a bit difficult to follow, and should be amplified]

    The predictive –if not directive- function of the 1:1 drawing was its salient characteristic.  In the case of the Baptistry panel, that function was not immediately obvious.  What they share is their mathematical precision and the property of having an existence independent of the real objects that the same mathematics inform.  The 1:1 drawing has no taint of empiricism about it: it has unambiguous priority over the structure.  Alberti’s costruzione legittima lays down conditions for what will at length occupy the picture space.  It does not predict locations of things, but it does insist that all things will be subject to a single rule of diminution with distance from the point of view of the observer (or, at any rate, projection point).  Its priority in the process of creating the historia is absolute.  The brilliance of its conception is that the perspective pavement was, in effect, a two-dimensional ruler, and one easily made into a three-dimensional one.  It thus contained, if the expression may be coined, the totality of virtuality, and can be considered a distillation and universalisation of the 1:1 drawing, the virtual dome of Florence Cathedral.

    [connecting Alberti with works around the Platea Sanct Petri and the Benediction Loggia.  Stefano Borso, Leon Battista Alberti e l’antichita romana, p.34-36, reports Poliziano writing that Alberti was instrumental in Paolo Romano being chosen to create the giant statue of St Paul before St Peters.  Mino da Fiesole, Bernardo Rossellino’s associate was also in for the job. (he did something behind the high alter of Santa Maria maggiore, I think)  Check the facts here.  For, though, it’s Poliziano’s remark that is important, he’d have been referring to Pius’s time, though he says that he’s recalling Paul II’s time.  See note 10, p.139 for ref. to Bollettino d’Arte article, 1991.  Borsi conjectures that Alberti had an important role in directing an idea of all’antica sculpture in a normative direction and away from the eccentricity of late Donatello.  See also, p.44, where Borsi notes the use of the word Colossus in connection with the statues of Ss Peter and Paul in a note in Pandino’s Ad divum Pium…  The word, he says, is an Albertian term.]

    In connection with the Platea Sancti Petri and the Benediction Loggia, there’s the possibility, that Borsi alludes to (p.46-7) that Alberti’s attemp to to get De statua published was connected with the production of the colossal statues of Peter and Paul.  His apparatus, together with his table of sizes, was ideal for creating statues of different sizes than maquettes and models.

    Acqua vergine; Alberti was described as ‘perdoctissimus’ in relation to aqueducts.p.81/127  See also De re Book X, chapter 7

    Borsi (125) suggests that Alberti may have been involved in the proposal to build a chapel to comemorate the arrival of the head of St Andrew (May, 1461) at Ponte Molle.  Paolo Romano got the commission (as he had for the statue of St Paul[?]).

    Look at Burroughs, JWC, 45, 1982.  It something about Nicholas’s project, involving St Michael.  See also “A planned myth and a myth of planning”.

    [1] Leon Battista Alberti, Opere Volgari, a cura di C. Grayson Vol III, Bari: Laterza, 1973, Della Pittura: ‘Prese l’architetto, se io non erro pure dal pittore gli architravi, le base, I capitelli, le colonne, frontispici e simile tutte altre cose.”(p.46, lines 9-10): ‘ Nam architectus quidem epistilia, capitula, bases, columnas fastigiaque et hiuis modi caeteras omnes aedificiorum laudes, ni fallor, ab ipso tantum pictore sumpsit.’(p.47, l.11-13)

    [2] Grayson, III, Della pittura/De pictura, p.10/11

    [3] He showed a similarly cheerful disregard of impractical fastidiousness when, in De pictura/Della pittura, he refused to meditate upon the physiology of the eye and the neurology of vision and insisted in effect that, for the purposes of perspective, the eye be considered a geometrical point.  The eye was the seat of the sense of vision, which otherwise went undefined.  Op.cit., p.16/17

    [4] Antonio Manetti, The Life of Brunellschi, p.89, l.944-5

    [5] Manetti describes a multitude of aids to construction of the dome.  See, op.cit., p.93, l.998-1026

    [6] Preventing an automatic building process, among other factors, was the irregularity of the octagon itself.  The sides vary by as much as half a meter.

    [7] Their starting point is a document published by Cesare Guasti, La Cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze: Barbera, Bianchi & Comp., 1857.  On 4th February, 1425, the Opera renewed Brunelleschi’s and Ghiberti’s appointments at the same time as recording a report of 24th January about the dome. A safety barrier will be erected to that the bricklayers [maestri] will not have to look down, ‘…e morisi con gualandrino con tre corde, faccia dentro e si di fuori.’( Doc 75, p.40).  Ippolito Lamberto and Chiara Paroni (La Cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore, Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1997, p.[get]) say that a ‘gualandrino’ was a kind of set square used by stone carvers and metal workers to establish angles.  The term is a diminutive and the apparatus was perhaps not very large.

    [8] Archivio Storico di Firenze, Opera di Firenze, 90.  See…[get?]

    [9] Orlandi, L’Architettura, III,14: ‘Est tamen inter testudines una omnium recta spherica, quae armamenta non postulet, quando ea quidem non ex arcubus solum constat, verum etiam coronis.[…] 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 innixu.’(p.245)  That Alberti construed the dome of Florence Cathedral in this way is indicated perhaps by his description of the dome as a corona in the poem that he wrote for the Certame Coronario  the poetry contest that he organised in the Cathedral in 1444.  See, Girolamo (Hieronymo) Mancini, Opera inedita et pauca separatim impressa, Florentiae: Sansoni, 1980, pp.236-37: ‘Dite, o mortali, che sì fulgente corona/poneste in mezo, che pur mirando volete? /Forse l’amicitia, qual col celeste Tonante/tra li celicoli e 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’.  The Certame Coronario is discussed at several places, below.

    [10] Antonio Manetti (The Life of Brunelleschi) described the process of using ‘…una canna o pertica, ferma dallo lato piu baso, che girassj per tutto, poco a poco ristringiendo, tocchando e mattonj o vero mezane… ‘(l.668-70) Ross King refers to Bartolomeo Scala, in Historia Florentinorum, c.1490, describing a cord stretched to the circumference of the dome.(p.85)  He is clearly talking nonsense.  He may well have mistaken the context of the passage just cited, thinking that it referred to the dome of the Cathedral.

    [11] Alberti proposed a modified method for polygonal domes: ‘Angularem quoque testudinem  sphericam, modo pro eius istius crassitudinem rectam spericam interstruas, poteris attollere nullis armamentis.’ Grayson, III, 14, p.247.  Mainstone argues that the wall-head of the octagon was wide enough to enclose a circular ring [ref].   This is questionable for two reasons. All the structural matter of the dome, at springing level, would have to have fallen within the circle.  This does not seem to be possible. The second point is that the dome, viewed from within the building, retains its octagonal form at that level.  Moreover, if the circle had been achievable, the faceted  form of the dome was unnecessary.  The counter-argument –that the facetted nature of the drum needed to be continued into the dome itself- is unconvincing where the virtue of the dome rising out of a circle is so obvious.

    [12] See Eugenio Battisti, Brunelleschi: The Complete Works, London: Thames & Hudson, 1981, p.124.

    [13] It is easy to conceive a device based on Giovanni di Gherardo’s drawing (ASF. Opera di Firenze, 90).  Let wires be stretched from the angles of the octagon through the centre at the level of the springing.  At one fifth of the length of these wires others are attached, four fifths of the length.  These points are connected by a ring of wires of equal length, creating an octagon in the plane of the springing of the dome.  It is now possible, in theory, to regulate the profile of the dome at the eight angles.  In order to regulate the eight surfaces of the dome rising from the sides of the octagon, another octagon has to be fixed in the springing plane with a greater diameter than the first (because the dome, on the shorter diagonal has to reach the same height as that on the long).  Wires long enough to reach the far faces of the octagon would be attached to this larger octagon by loops, so that they can be shifted along the wire, or line, that is parallel to the panel of the dome that curves upward between the angles of the octagon.

    [14] A more obvious use for a 1:1 drawing is for the making of templates.  The Gothic mason frequently had 1:1 drawings of parts of the building under construction to which he could address, presumably, the stone that he had cut.  At Florence, however, a 1:1 drawing to be used in this way would only have to have been one eighth of the dome, since templates for any part of the dome can be got from a drawing of one segment of it.  The drawing that Brunelleschi made was to regulate growth, establishing distances and orientations.

    [15] Alberti, De re aedificatoria, IX,5

    [16] Leon Battista Alberti. De statua, a cura di Marco Collareta, Livorno: Sillabe, 1999

    [17] He praised the dome and Brunelleschi’s genius in the prologue to Della pittura.

    [18] The closeness of the thinking of De Statua to Alberti’s experience of Brunelleschi’s dome could carry the implication that the treatise was written close to events, and therefore close to 1435/6 when he produced De pictura/Della pittura

    [19] See, Albertiana, Vol.VI, 2003, Leo S. Olschki Editore, pp.125-215 (various authors). 

    [20] The data indicating the whereabouts of the monuments of Rome would have been like those indications of dimensio and finitio in De statua in that the one would allow the map to be drawn anywhere and the other would allow the statue to be made at any time in the absence of the original model.  See De statua, para 4, p.6. [a quote perhaps] In para 5, Alberti goes on to observe that, with the data of dimensio and finitio, it would be possible to make one half of a statue in one place and one in another, and the parts would fit.

    [21] The elements of the procedure are deployed for map-making and distance-finding in Ludi Mathematici, Alberti, Opere Volgari, Vol.III, Bari: Laterza, 1973, pp.163-69.

    [22] Mario Carpo, “Alberti’s Vision and a Plan for Rome”, Albertiana, VI, 2003, pp.209-214

    [23] Poggio Bracciolini, “De varietate Fortunae”, in Opere Volgari…[Get]

    [24] Orlandi,L’Architettura, X,7, p.923; Rykwert et al, p.337: ‘This circle is called a horizon.’

    [25] Torgil Magnuson discusses Manetti’s account in Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture, Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1958, pp.55ff.

    [26] Orlandi, L’Architettura, Prologue, p.13; Rykwert et al, p.5: ‘As to the imperial authority and fame that the Latins got by their building, I need only mention the various tombs and other ruins of past glory visible all around, which have taught us to accept much of the historical tradition that may otherwise have seemed less convincing.’

    [27] Alberti, De re aedificatoria, X,17.  If Alberti hoped to gain the pope’s confidence in him as a director of urban renewal by presenting him with a copy of De re aedificatoria, the presence in the text of passages that the pope could contrue as criticism of his own actions is surprising.  It is possible that the following passage was added later but, if not, if is difficult to think that Nicholas would not have thought that the battered and crenellated Nicholas Wing of the Vatican Palace was an intended target of criticism: ‘I do not share the affectation of some of endowing private habitations with battlements and pinnacles; a habit which suits as best fortresses, and in a particular way tyrants, and for that reason is far from suitable for a well-ordered state and a peaceful citizenry, because it implies an attitude of fear and being crushed.’ Alberti, IX,4, p.809

    [28] [get check Burroughs says the dedicatee of Roma Instaurata was Nicholas V

    [29] Ref. Magnuson, Westfall etc

    [30] He concludes his description of the procedure: ‘Nos circuli istius adminiculo ad urbium provinciarumque descriptione, annotandam atque pingendam, ad cuniculos etian subterraneos producendos bellissime utimur.’ Orlandi, L’architettura, X, 7, p.925:  Rykwert et al, p.338: ‘This circle is very useful for marking and drawing maps of a city or province, and also for plotting underground conduits.’

    [31] Certainly, the drift of Giannozzo’s report of Nicholas V’s deathbed speech to the cardinals, is that the project begun is to be continued.  At the beginning, Nicholas orders them to listen to the reasoning driving the scheme (‘Audite, audite … rationes…’) and to give consideration to its ongoing aims (‘…causasque considerate’).  See, Smith and O’Connor, p.472.  He asks the cardinals to continue and finish the works: ‘…venerationes vestras … exhortamur, quatenus predicta constructionum nostrarum opera incoata prosequi ac perficere et absolvere velitis…’ (.p.482)

    [32] For a discussion of the bridge as one of Sixtus IV’s principal public works, see Jill E. Blondin, “Power made Visible: Pope Sixtus IV as Urbis restaurator in Quattrocento Rome”, The Catholic Historical Review, Vol.XCI, January 2005, No.1, pdf. p.1-25

    [33] Egmont Lee, Sixtus IV and Men of Letters, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e letterature, 1978, pp.123-24, quotes Giovanni Campano and Raffaello Maffei to this effect.

    [34] A sense of pious debt to the father of an innovation could have been lacking here, as it was when Sixtus IV announced himself the founder of the Vatican Library, in the painting by Melozzo da Forli now in the Pinacoteca, usurping Nicholas’s claim.

    [35] Orlandi, L’Architettura, IV,5, p.305-7; Rykwert et al, p.106: ‘When the road reaches a city, and that city is renowned and powerful, the streets are better straight, to add to its dignity and majesty.’

    [36] Christine Smith & Joseph O’Connor, Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the material and spritual edifice, Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,, Tempe, Arizona, in collaboration with BREPOLS, 2006, p.372

    [37] The present statue by Antoon Verschaffelt [1752] is the last of several replacements.  St Michael’s presence also alludes to a vision of Gregory the Great in 590 and a recurrence during the plague of 1348.  Gregory saw an angel atop the mausoleum of Hadrian sheathing a bloody sword and took it as a sign that the plague had been lifted from the city.  (Golden Legend Get.)  Nicholas replaced a figure of St Michael that had been destroyed in 1379.  See Carroll Westfall, In this Most Perfect Paradise, University Park and London:  the Pennsylvannia State University Press, 1974, p.100; Charles Burroughs, From Signs to Design, MIT Press, Cambridge Massacusetts, London, 1990, p.73.

    [38] This dramatisation of the pilgrims’ way was made very much clearer and more elaborate by Bernini in the seventeenth century. In the middle of the  fifteenth century, a very considerable addition to the St Peter’s complex was the Benediction Loggia in front of the atrium and atop a broad flight of steps.  The work was begun in the time of Pius II.  However, it too can be thought of as participating in the drama that first begins to unfold with the crossing of the river under the gaze of the Archangel Michael and was conceived, in general at least during the papacy of Nicholas.  Giannozzo Manetti tells of how, at the east end of the palace, “Super hoc atrium coenaculum magnum anniversariis et ordinariis summi pontificis benedictionibus designatum aptabatur, quod versus Orientem in pontem molis Adrianae respiciebat.” (Torgil Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture, Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1958, p.355).  At the end of his account of Nicholas V’s works of building in Roma and the Vatican, he compares St Peter’s with the Temple of Solomon, whose magnificence the former exceeds.  Among other things, where the Temple has one portico, St Peter’s has three.(p.362)  He would be counting the confronting porticos of the Atrium and one other.  If this third refers to the Benediction Loggia, which was not yet built in Nicholas’s time, Giannozzo would appear to be consulting a drawing or model rather than a built fabric.  There is a note of boyish glee in his description of the Vatican works that suggests that he might have been pouring over a drawing or model as he wrote.  He uses the imperfect tense and sometimes describes things that had not been done.  For example, he goes on immediately to say that the obelisk that stood actually to the south of the church of St Peter’s (it was in fact the goal of the southernmost of the three streets passing west from the Piazza by the Castel Sant’Angelo) was placed [collocabat[ur)]  in the Platea Sancti Petri.  The people were to be gathered together for the experience of spectacle.  Had the Benediction Loggia been built beyond the four bays actually erected, to the number that would extend the whole width of the steps built by Pius II, the clergy and choirs gathered in it on the three levels would have put the faithful in mind of the heavenly host. 

    [39] A fine sense of the pressure put upon the Ponte Sant’Angelo as the single link with Rome to the south is given in the Cronache Romane quoted by Pastor: ‘In Holy Week the throngs coming from St Peter’s, or going there, were so enormous that they were crossing the Bridge over the Tiber until the second and the third hour of the Night.’(Ludvig Pastor, The History of the Popes, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co,, Lid., 1923 (fifth edition), Vol.II, p.84)

    [40] Braun and Hogenberg’s map in Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Vol.II, of 1575, shows the bridge ‘rebuilt’. [check Giovanni Rucellai’s description of the jubilee pilgrimage route. 68] [ check Magnuson.  Did Manetti say that Nicholas planned the restoration of acqueducts and bridges?] [A question to address is whether the line of the old bridge was to be followed, in which case it would line up with the via Recta, or only one of its piers would be used as part of a bridge continuing the line of the via Giulia.  See Tafuri on this point.]

    [41] In De re aedificatoria (Orlandi, L’Architettura, VIII, 6, p.709), Alberti describes one of ancient Rome’s two sacred streets: ‘…the latter is 2,500 feet in length and protected by a portico of marble columns and lead roofing,’ Rykwert et al, p.261

    [42] Orlandi, L’Architettura, VII,6.  It was, at one time, roofed:’…aliquibus etiam tectum: quale Romae ad pontem omnium praestantissimum Adriani, opus, me superi!, dignum memoratu, cuius etiam, ut ita loquar, cadavera spectabam cum admiratione.  Steterat enim illic tectum columnis excitatum quadraginta duabus marmoreis, opera trabeato, tectura aenea, ornatu mirifico.’(p.711) Rykwert et al.  ‘Some bridges even have a roof, like that of Hadrian in Rome, the most splendid of bridges – a memorable work, by heaven: even the sight of what might be called its carcass would fill me with admiration.  The beams of its roof were supported by forty-two marble columns: it was covered in bronze and marvelously decorated.’ (p.262)

    [43] Vasari, [get ref. Alberti drawing of ponte Sant’Angelo ref.  See also, below]

    [44] Alberti’s general enthusiasm for practical inventions that emerges clearly from Ludi Mathematici and is noted in Profugiorum ab aerumna [get], produces a very agreeable object in the form of the map of Rome and the table of coordinates.

    [45] After describing the Ponte Sant’Angelo, Alberti goes on to the describe the bridge that he would build. This ideal bridge (ibid.) does not differ in important particulars from the Ponte Sisto though it does lack some refinements.  Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.711ff.; Rykwert et al, p.262ff.

    [46] Borsi, 1986, p.41-50

    [47] Antonio Manetti, The Life of Brunellschi by Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, Introd, notes and Critical Text Edition by Howard Saalman, English Translation by Catherine Enggass, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Part and London, 1970, p.43-5, l.167-203

    [48] In a letter of 1413, Domenico da Prato, writing to Alessandro di Michele Rondinelli, referred to ‘…prespettivo, ingegnoso uomo Filippo di ser Brunellescho, ragguardevole di virtudi e di fame.’ See, Hugh Hudson, ‘The Monuments of Florence, Real and Imagined in the Earl Renaissance: The Development of the Single-point Perspective in Painting’, in Place, an interdiciplinary e-journal, p.1

    [49] Eugenio Battisti (Brunelleschi: the complete works, Thames & Hudson: London. 1981, p.102) notes that Brunellschi was Prior of the S. Giovanni Quarter in 1425 and the banners of the district bore an image of the Baptistry. (p.102) The genial thought follows of Brunelleschi’s tenure seeing new banners for old.

    [50] Ghiberti’s suggestion in his Commentaries that Pliny’s story of Apelles’ fine line might better have been a demonstration of perspective fits with this aspect of the demonstration of Brunelleschi.  Brunellschi’s Baptistry was as real to its observer as was the bunch of grapes painted by Zeuxia to the bird that pecked them.

    [51] Or the picture could have been of an element now obscured by the tiles: ‘E tra la pelle delle chupole … sono im varj luoghj varj provedimenti e sue industrie.’ Antonio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, p. 92 and p.93, l.1000-03)

    [52] Rykwert et al, p.5; Orlandi, L’architettura,  Prologue, p.15: ‘Nam aedificium quidem corpus quoddam esse animadvertimus, quod lineamentis veluti alia corpora constaret et materia…’

    [53] Antonio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, : ‘E io lo avuto in mano e veduto piu uolte a mia dj e possone rendere testimonianza.’ (p.44/45, l.202-03)

    .[He also gives an account of proposals for the Platea Sancti Petri: ‘Ante primum igitur hujus sacrae aedis vestibulum super scalas prominens maxima quaedam area quingentorum in longitudine, centum in latitudine cubitorum pulcherrime apparebat.  A formosis namque praedicti vestibuli gradibus, quos partim marmoreos partim porphyreis, partim smaragdinorum colorum decoris, gratia interferebat, incipiens, usque ad egregia et nobilitata intercolumnia per quingentos, ut diximus, passus in longum extendebatur, super quibus tres commemorati vici porticus, speciosorum omnium spectaculorum visu pulcherrimum specimen, sustentabantur.’ (Magnuson, p.356).

  • 2 Alberti post mortem

    The present aim is to describe Alberti’s architectural activity beyond the strict limits of his building practice.  It is a sort of borderland that is to be explored, where boundaries of all sorts are uncertain, provisional and porous.  Is the prospect then of a featureless and limitless heathland?  No: rather the view is of winding and intersecting paths and sudden long perspectives.  It is a landscape of exploration and discovery.

    First of all, the boundary that is represented by death itself is of a paradoxical character.  For the observer, the chronological limits of a life are not finite.  Fame transgresses them.  So, in the spirit of enquiry into what is beyond, and as a preparatory exercise so-to-speak in tracing the imprecise, there calls to be described Alberti’s late-fifteenth-century ghost –a shape elusive, consisting in the vague contours of perhaps imperfect memory, through the distortions of misinformation and the pragmatism of tendentiousness.

    The reliability of posthumous witnesses to the life of Alberti is not guaranteed; but their evidence calls to be evaluated.  An attempt to describe his post-mortem existence in the first decades after 1472 could be useful.  Certainly, it adds to the data that may be of relevance for an understanding of his life and work.  The conditional and subjunctive voices must be recurrent in this sort of enquiry, and the reader remains the judge.

    Alberti’s writings and therefore his thinking on architecture continued to be of interest.  Clearest evidence is in the fact that De re aedificatoria was published in Florence in 1485.  A printed version of Vitruvius did not appear until 1486.[1]

    Equally indicative, we may believe, of the influence of Alberti on architectural thinking is a thread of commentary that passes through Antonio Manetti’s Life of Brunelleschi.[2]  If something was irking Manetti –for the tone is sometimes resentful and querulous– it was surely not Alberti’s architecture itself of which he was critical, for that could have no deleterious effect upon the reputation of the work of his subject, Brunelleschi.  A consideration of the argument and of the motivation for its insertion leads to the proposition that Manetti’s biography was, in a perverse way, a hidden obituary of Alberti; prompted in part by the reputation that he had left behind.[3]  Perhaps Manetti had got wind of plans to publish De re aedificatoria, and he feared the pre-eminence that it would claim for the author.

    Equally galling might have been the claims of Cristoforo Landino who, in his Apologia di Dante, published in 1481, commemorated Alberti’s skills:

    Where is Alberti to be found, or in what category of the learned shall I put him?  You will say, among the natural scientists.  And indeed I assert that he was born precisely to investigate the secrets of Nature.  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.‘  Landino goes on to praise Alberti’s practical and theoretical accomplishment in the visual arts, before turning to the Trivium and addressing his literary style: ‘Like a cameleon he appeared, always adapting to the hue of the matter that he wrote about.’[4]  He contributed, Landino continues, to the development of the Italian language, in the tradition of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Fazio degli Uberti and ‘in prose has outstretched and surpassed all his predecessors.[5] 

    The appearance, in 1480, of the Disputationes Camaldulenses, in book I of which Alberti had a prominent role in discussion with Lorenzo de’ Medici may also have irked Manetti.

    Filarete, in Book II of his Trattati, written in the early 1460s, anticipated Landino in the general drift of his mention of ‘Battista Alberti il quale a questi nostri tempi, uomo dottissimo in più facultà, è in questa molto perito, massime nel disegno, il quale è fondamento e via di ogni arte che di mano si faccia.  E questo lui intende ottimamente in geometria ed altre scienze è intendentissimo; lui ancora ha fatto in latino opera elegantissima.’[6]

    Angelo Poliziano, in his dedication of De re aedificatoria to Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote,

    Surely there was no field of knowledge however remote, no discipline however arcane, that escaped his attention; you might have asked yourself whether he was more an orator than a poet, whether his style was more majestic or graceful.  So thorough had been his examination of the remains of antiquity that he was able to grasp every principle of ancient architecture, and knew it by example; his invention was not limited to machinery, lifts and automata, but also included the wonderful forms of buildings.  He had moreover the highest reputation as both painter and sculptor, and since he achieved a greater mastery in all these different arts than only a few can manage in any single one, it would be more telling, as Sallust said about Carthage, to be silent about him than to say little.[7] 

    Poliziano surely intends his reader to smile at his own disregard of Sallust’s rule, for the encomium seems comprehensive.

    Alberti receives only one direct mention in the Life of Brunelleschi.  The general polemic of the biography, however, can be argued to contain an attempt to rectify what was, for Manetti, a false conception of the history of architecture in fifteenth-century Florence and, in place of Alberti, to reinstate Brunelleschi as its true father.

    Manetti is at pains to establish Brunelleschi as the first archaeologist of ancient Roman architecture.  He and Donatello –who, Manetti insists, did not understand his associate’s purposes and analyses– hired labour and made excavations:

    No one else attempted such work or understood why they did it.  This lack of understanding was due to the fact that during that period, and for hundreds of years before, no one paid attention to the classical method of building: if certain writers in pagan times gave precepts about that method, as Battista degli Alberti has done in our period, they were not much more than generalities.  However, the invenzioni – those things peculiar to the master – were in large part the product of empirical investigation or of his own [theoretical] efforts.[8]

    Manetti is, in effect, accusing Alberti of superficiality as a student of ancient architecture: he has located himself in a literary tradition, but has neglected to look closely at the material relics.  The latter tell a different story.  From ancient writings come general rules, but no insight into the art.  The student of individual buildings deals not with generalities, and there discovers not the formulaic but the creativity of the architect himself.  Alberti (unlike Brunelleschi) was cut off from the possibility of making such discoveries.  The translation of the final sentence of the passage does not catch Manetti’s point.  Earlier on, in the discussion of Brunelleschi’s invention of the one-point perspective system, he had set up an opposition between industry and intelligence, connecting them with invention and rediscovery.  He wrote, ‘Ma la sua industria e sottiglieza o ella la ritrovo o ella ne fu inventrice.’[9]  By repeating ‘o ella’ the writer lays a choice before the reader.  A bald translation would be, ‘Either his industry rediscovered it or his ingenuity invented it.’  The reader is to decide which is the writer’s preference.  The later passage, lacking the symmetry of the earlier, allows for both wit and application in the production of innovation.  By transferring the passage into the indicative voice, the translator removes a note of insistence that is present.  Manetti is drawing a distinction between what masters and those lacking mastery are capable of: ‘…bisognia che … sieno…’  A paraphrastic translation would be: ‘But it is necessary that inventions, which are things belonging specifically to mastery, should largely be gifts of nature or [to a lesser degree the product] of individual industry.’  The clear implication is that Alberti’s contribution is founded on neither wit nor industry and does not lead to fresh achievement.  Of course, the battle is being fought on paper: Manetti would be hard-pressed to make the point before Alberti’s actual buildings.

    Throughout the Life there are scores being settled.  Ghiberti, Donatello, Francesco della Luna –Brunelleschi’s fellow architectural amateur and member of the Silk Merchants Guild– and Antonio Ciaccheri Manetti, his model-maker, are fingered, for thwarting, misunderstanding and betraying Brunelleschi’s purposes.  Classical architectural solecisms in Brunelleschi’s buildings are, in other words, to be blamed on others.  But there are also more elusive and perhaps insidious threats to Brunelleschi’s fame; after his death, damage continues to be done. 

    In emphasizing Brunelleschi’s precocity as an investigator of Roman remains, Manetti claims for him an expertise the lack of which would, in fact, do him no discredit, given that the achievement of a rational classicism at such an early time on the basis of a very limited understanding of material classicism would be admirable enough.  Special pleading is necessary, given the relative sophistication of the 1480s view upon classical architecture.  Manetti is reaching beyond simple encomium here.  In addition, the need to insist upon Brunelleschi’s having reconstructed the orders, when there is no evidence of him having done much more than recognise the Corinthian and Ionic, is also a sign that Manetti’s purpose was not so much to praise his subject as to advance a claim against opposition.  Among that opposition to the reputation of Brunelleschi was –it can be argued– the fame of Alberti.

    Repeatedly, in the biography, Brunelleschi out-Alberti’s Alberti.  An emphasis in the Life which is slightly surprising is on Brunelleschi’s activities as an architectural  advisor.  He is consulted by princes.[10]  In itself, the emphasis cannot be particularly fruitful because, by its nature, advice leaves little trace in the form of surviving material evidence to honour its source; and Brunelleschi’s merits remain elusive.  What does emerge is the implication that Brunelleschi’s influence was strategic; his shaping of architectural understanding happening at the highest social and most politically-effective levels.  Now, Alberti seems to be rivalled in this.  Whilst, nowadays, the influence of Alberti’s built work and of his treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria, seem most noteworthy, it was perhaps not always the case.  Alberti’s activity as an advisor could have been particularly prominent.  He was a formative influence on the thinking of princes, as peripatetic architectural advisor.  And there are important projects which almost certainly received Alberti’s contribution at the planning stage.  The hard evidence has, of course, eroded with the passage of time.  But, closer to events, it could have seemed that no pie was without Alberti’s finger in it.  It was important that Brunelleschi should influence by his ideas as well as by his built work.

    In view of Alberti’s expertise and his publicly-indicated desire and his opportunity to shape the thinking and practice of architecture in Rome, Florence and the princely courts, it is scarcely conceivable –no matter, silence in the documentation– that he did not serve in an advisory role in the formulation of the plans of Nicholas V and Pius II for Rome and Pienza.  His activities at Rimini, Ferrara, Urbino and Mantua –and no doubt elsewhere– would have been well-known. It could have seemed a relentless omnipresence.  This is not the place to enlarge upon the point in detail: that will be done below.  But the Benediction Loggia and the systematisation of the approach to St Peter’s under Pius II are consistent with Alberti’s thinking about how clergy and laity should relate.  The portico and loggia of S. Marco, part of the insula of the Palazzo Venezia, bears a strong resemblance to the Benediction Loggia.  Alberti presented De re aedificatoria, substantially complete, to his friend Nicholas V in 1452.  He had begun ‘…que’ miei libri de architettura, quale  io scrissi richiesto dall’ Illustrissimo [Leonello d’Este]’ who died in 1450, so the text was not conceived and was probably not largely written with the repair of Rome in mind.[11]   That said, however, is it possible that Alberti sought no part in the laying of Nicholas’s plans for the re-instatement of Rome and the Vatican within Christendom and, perhaps, in her own pre-Christian history?  No discussion of Pienza will exclude debate about Alberti’s advisory presence, either in relation to the planning of some of the architectural elements (though not the façade of the cathedral whose grasp of the classical grammar is so weak as to fail the most unexacting test that Alberti could have set, and indicates the remoteness of his involvement with that part of the project) or in relation to the urbanistic concept as a whole. 

    Through De re aedificatoria, Alberti sought to influence architectural thinking at the level of philosophy and policy –well before an actual building and its form would emerge for consideration.  Manetti’s undermining of that activity as mere generalisation has the effect of preserving for Brunelleschi the prime strategic and historical position within the classical-architectural revival.  In addition, Manetti insists upon Brunelleschi’s cogency and fluency as an advisor.  His oral explanation of the dome project was much fuller than the text of the memorandum that he prepared.[12]  Manetti continues: ‘He explained the matter orally much more clearly and fully than he had done in the written account for those who asked and were interested and could comprehend it.  He did it in such a way that many, admiringly, became quite expert about it.  As a consequence he achieved great renown and confidence.  His marvelous genius were[?] proclaimed everywhere’.[13] This is reportage or fabulation, for Manetti was a boy during the period of construction of the dome.  In either case, it must conceal a polemic.  Brunelleschi was also an able informal educator.[14]  With such skills as a communicator, he measures himself against any pedagogue.  And if one teacher published no better than commonplaces, so much was Brunelleschi’s educative merit superior.

    Howard Saalman observes that Manetti’s excursus into the history of architecture is indebted to Alberti’s.[15] If so, his deviations from Alberti’s account amount to contradictions.  The main difference between the two arguments is that Manetti’s history traces materialist changes more than does Alberti’s.  Bitumen, brick, stone and timber are important factors in his narrative.  Alberti tells a more philosophically-directed story.  Architecture’s beginnings in Egypt and then Assyria were materialist, and progress consisted in crude increase in size and richness.  The Greeks, by contrast, made an austere and frugal architecture whose merit consisted in the rigour of its mathematics –an abstract content.  Alberti had introduced his brief history with a very strong metaphor.  Like an organic thing, architecture had grown, flourished and come to maturity: ‘Aedificatoria, quantum ex veterum monumentis percipimus, primam adolescentiae, ut sit loquar, luxuriem profudit in Asia; mox apud Graecos floruit; postremo  probatissimam adepta est maturitatem in Italia.’[16]  The teleology is so insistent that it is easy to overlook the actual antithesis that Alberti set up between Asia and Greece, but, when noticed, it is difficult to resist the notion of a Hegelian sort of synthesis.  At last, with the Romans, a development was complete and the reconciliation of an opposition was achieved: the wealth of the Romans enabled them to build copiously and sumptuously; but they never fell into Asiatic excess.  For in their recollection of their own republican frugality, together with the intellectual debt that they owed to the Greeks, they always gave to their building a core of probity and intellectual seriousness.[17]  If as Alberti said, architecture should be a meeting of form and matter, Rome’s architecture was best.  A more materialistic history, on the other hand, would perhaps better find its apogee in an architect lauded for his outstanding practical gifts –a Daedelean figure, like Manetti’s subject as he was celebrated in Florence Cathedral.

    Manetti also knew Alberti’s treatise on painting.  It was surely Landino’s knowledge of that text that encouraged him to claim for Alberti preeminence as a perspectivalist.  The text surely threatened to cast Brunelleschi, the perspectivalist, into oblivion, for Landino’s words dismiss rivals: ‘in perspective he was a prodigy, greater than anyone over the centuries.’  Manetti’s account of Brunelleschi’s invention of the one-point perspective system concludes on the point that his achievement owed nothing to the ancients: ‘We do not know whether centuries ago the ancient painters … knew about perspective or employed it rationally.  If indeed they employed it by rule … as he did later, whoever could have imparted it to him had been dead for centuries and no written records about it have been discovered, or if they have been, have not been comprehended.  Through industry and intelligence he either rediscovered or invented it.’[18]  Alberti, in the prologue to Della pittura, had also praised Brunelleschi on his independence of ancient precept, but in relation to the Florence Cathedral dome project.  In the treatise, Alberti had gone on to offer a perspective procedure for painters, making no mention of Brunelleschi as the forefather of the method.  By asserting Brunelleschi’s independence of precedent in relation to the perspective method, Manetti was, in effect or deliberately, undermining Alberti’s authority as an original voice within the pages of Della Pittura and as the one advanced by Landino.  Manetti returned to the matter of uninstructed invention.  This time he re-established Brunelleschi as an innovator in his achievement of the dome: ‘He saw and reflected on the many beautiful things, which as far as is known had not been present in other masters from ancient times.’[19]  Manetti seems also to hint that Brunelleschi’s perspective method germinated in his surveying of the ruins of ancient Rome.[20]

    On several occasions, Alberti claimed to be acting independently of precedent.  In making the claim, he was, for Manetti, rivalling the exemplary innovator of the age, Brunelleschi.  Alberti did not regard the classical architectural orders as definitive in number and form. [This point is elaborated later on.  Might the point be made more briefly here?]  New orders could be invented: ‘…non quo eorum descriptionibus transferendis nostrum in opus quasi astricti legibus hereamus, sed quo inde admoniti novis  nos proferendis inventis contendamus parem illis maioremve, si queat, fructum laudis assequie.’[21]  He believed that he was treating new material in De pictura: ‘…et a nemine quod viderim alio tradita litteris materia…’[22]  In writing about colour, he had no fount of wisdom to draw on: ‘ferunt Euphranorem priscum pictorem de coloribus nonnihil mandasse literis.  Ea scripta non extant hac tempestate.  Nos autem qui hanc picturae artem seu ab aliis olim descriptam ab inferis repetitam in lucem restituimus, sive nunquam a quoquam tractatam a superis deduximus, nostro ut usque fecimus ingenio, pro instituto rem prosequamur.’[23] At last, he felt himself able to claim, ‘Nos tamen hanc palmam praeripuisse ad voluptatem ducimus, quandoquidem primi fuerrimus qui hanc artem subtilissimam literis mandaverimus.’[24]  On other occasions, Alberti made similar claims. [Take the stuff below and integrate it into Section 14.  In De equo animante, he states that he has things to say about horses’ illnesses that were unremarked by the ancients.[25] At the beginning of Book II of De famiglia, Leon Battista addresses Lionardo and praises his way of thinking – different in character from that of the ancient authors.[26]  Adovardo, in Book IV does not bow to the authority of the ancients on the matter of amicizia: ‘Ma parmi in questa materia già fra me non so che piú desiderarvi altro filo e testura, in quale né degli antichi ancora scrittori alcuno apieno mi satisfece.’[27]  He notes that it was a topic not much treated by the ancients and doubts if the general reader would find much to praise in what they did write.[28]  It is with false modesty that, before Lionardo, he disclaims the possibility that he should have been able to come up with original ideas about amicizia: ‘Ma divolgarete voi in publico ch’io uomo ingegnosissimo trovai nuove e non prima scritte amicizie?’[29]  There is no such modesty when Adovardo comes to laying out the rule for how to avoid envy: ‘cosa utilissima e forse non altrove udita.’[30]]

    What emerges from these passages is Alberti’s belief that he has made discoveries, inventions and unprecedented observations.  Manetti, in the biography, made sure that Brunelleschi had first claim on the title of inventor.

    [Shift this too.  Alberti’s Intercenale, ‘Annuli’ is about making new things.  Pebbles are to be got from the fountain (the history of letters).  So is golden sand.  Philoponius casts it into rings and inscribes them.  The idea is that the aggregate is changed into the artist’s own work.  His work is not just a polishing of works already made.]

    ——

    So much for reputation.  What of material signs of Alberti’s postumous influence?  Manetti’s enmity, though of a debatable depth, is sufficiently demonstrated to establish that Alberti’s influence upon architectural thinking survived his death.  De re aedificatoria, evidently, continued to shape or affect thinking.  The treatise, as well as being a manual of instruction, carried a polemic, the outlines of which are to be discerned dimly nowadays, and were, no doubt, clearer to see closer to Alberti’s time.[31] Were Albertian buildings rising in the years after his death?

    There is a dictum that seems to stand at the very centre of Alberti’s thinking about church architecture, and seems by turn to have been transformed into a pattern for churches in the following decades.  The argument was reduced to its essence in this; a divide existed between pastor and priest and between a faithful committed to one another and to their individual salvation.  The church, reduced to its core elements, consisted of a congregational space and a sacramental one: ‘All temples consist of a portico and, on the inside, a cella….’[32]  They stand in a certain dialectical relation.  And that relation seems to inform his thinking about the church building itself.  The Romans bequeathed to Christian tradition the temple and the basilica.  The one had, at its core, an arcane and sacramental religion.  The other served congregational purposes.  As a place of assembly adjacent to the public realm, it had something of the portico about it.  Another difference between the two religious buildings was that the temple would be vaulted and the basilica be timber-roofed.  Alberti employed this dualism to aid archaeological speculation when he came to discussing the curia in De re aedificatoria.[33]  It was evidently an instrument for discriminating between categories.  He confessed to having little direct knowledge of the building type where public speech is to take place; but he conjectured that there would be a religious curia and a secular one.  The difference would be that the one would associate itself with the form of the temple, and the other, of the basilica.  So, the religious curia would be vaulted and the secular one would be timber-ceiled.  The Tempio Malatestiano, as represented in Matteo de’Pasti’s medal, and Santissima Annunziata, with which Alberti was associated, combine these basic characteristics of the templum and basilica.  Other churches, do not conjoin vaulted and timber-roofed structures but do combine the sacramental space and the congregational in an approximation to the contrast that Alberti has in mind in De re aedificatoria.

    Several churches were built around the time of the pontificate of Sixtus IV. They diverge from traditional functional compositions but are true to the basic bi-partite division that Alberti proposed.  It is possible that Alberti’s advice echoed in the minds of their builders.  The church of S. Maria della Pace (1478-83) is, in its general functional composition, close to S. Pietro in Montorio (1472-80).  A nave with side-chapels carved out of the thickness of the wall, which is massive enough support for vaulting, gives onto an open sacramental place.  Chapels were also a by-product of vault-buttressing –to even more Roman effect– at Sant’ Andrea in Mantua.  At  S. Pietro in Montorio, the crossing which comes immediately before the sacramental place gives directly onto apsidal chapels.  The activity of these chapels almost jostles with witness to the ritual of the high altar.  In the case of S. Maria della Pace, this space is sufficiently integrated with the nave that it too has chapels. The arrangement is not very different from that at the rotunda of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, a building that, if it was not designed by Alberti, was praised by him.[34]  There, too, traffic to chapels around the domed space threatened, according to critics of the scheme, the composure of the clergy.  The result is that the notion of sanctuary is compromised.

    Around 1472 [?], there was a controversy in Florence about the form that the church of SS. Annunziata should take.  A rotunda with chapels, which seems to have been begun by Michelozzo in the late 40s at the east end, was in process of modification and completion.  Funds owing to the Marquis of Mantua, Lodovico Gonzaga, were supporting the campaign.  Objectors to the rotunda proposed instead that an arrangement of major chapel and flanking secondary chapels –familiar in Florence in such churches as S. Croce, S. Maria Novella and S. Trinità– be substituted.  Lodovico was irked to be importuned in this way.  At the same time, Alberti’s support for the rotunda was cited. [quote]

    Lodovico and Alberti prevailed.  Perhaps Antonio Manetti recalled this skirmish.  The plan that failed to convince was favoured not just by convention and arguments of convenience in Florence, but also by Brunelleschi himself, at S. Lorenzo. It would be possible to construe from the episode the threat of an eclipse.

    [VIII,9 contains Alberti’s description of the Curia Pontifica.  It resembles what was built later by Sixtus V as the Sistine Chapel (Borsi, p.38)  I don’t see it myself particularly.  I note that there were two curias.  Alberti speculates upon their differences.  The secular one he would have timber-roofed and the religious one vaulted, imagining that something of the temple would be appropriate to the latter and something of the basilica to the former.  Of course, the church is a hybrid of temple and basilica, sacred and (relatively) profane, cella and portico.]

    Alberti’s ideas probably also resonated in Sixtus’s  plan for the city of Rome as a whole.  They were surely influential in Nicholas’s five-point plan as described by Giannozzo Manetti.  Sixtus, an architecturally very ambitious pope, worked largely within the framework that Nicholas had proposed.

    Alberti’s spirit, along with Plutarch’s, was also present on 18th April 1506.  On this auspicious day, the New St Peter’s was begun  The inscription on Caradosso’s Medal marking the occasion is TEMPLI PETRI INSTAURACIO.  Alberti wrote in De re aedificatoria that the augurs predicted that Rome would become mistress of the world because a man born on the day of her foundation would become king: ‘Hunc  invenio fuisse Numam; nam conditam urbem et natum Numam ante diem XIII kalendas Maias meninit Plutarchus.’ (IV,3, p,293)  The day is 19th April.  The choice of 18th April for the laying of the foundation stone of New St Peter’s seems to acknowledge in some way the anniversary of the following day.  Numa might have a part, but the day a.u.c. certainly does.

    Another history of architecture of sorts in Deifira:

     Filarco

    Pallimacro, nella vita de’ mortali nulla si truova a chi non stia apparecchiato il suo fine. Troia fu grande e alta, Babillonia fu ricca e possente, furono Atene ornatissime e famosissime, e Roma fu temuta, riverita e ubbidita, quanto tempo il cielo e sua sorte a ciascuna permise.

    [1] Of course, fame can benefit from promotion.  Alberti had, so-to-speak, a sponsor.  As Poliziano says in the dedication, Bernardino Alberti, his cousin, was instrumental in publishing the treatise.  It would be a more disinterested scholarship that would promote the publication of an ancient Roman’s work.

    [2] Howard Saalman (The Life of Brunelleschi, by Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, Introduction, Notes and Critical Text edition by Howard Saalman, translation by Catherine Engass, The Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park and London, 1970) describes Alberti’s influence on Manetti’s Life of Brunelleschi as ‘profound’, and suggests the possibility, discussed further below, that Brunelleschi’s conducting of archaeological investigations in Rome was a fabrication by Manetti to give Brunelleschi the credentials necessary for architectural respectability in the second half of the fifteenth century. (p.29)  Otherwise, Saalman’s discussion of the Life as a critique of Alberti’s theory and practice depends upon a somewhat caricatured account of the latter.

    [3] Saalman dates the Life between 1497 (the death of Antonio Manetti in whose hand the oldest of the manuscript texts is written) and 1482 (the death of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (who is referred to in the past tense).  By more circumstantial argument he arrives at a likely terminus anti quem of 1489.(pp.10-11).  It may be remarked that the passage referring to Toscanelli is clearly an interpolation  It postpones Manetti’s promised treatment of the question of the origins and development of architecture whilst adding nothing to the immediate argument.  However, there is no way of knowing when the passage was inserted and it is not possible to hypothesise its addition to a text first prepared before Toscanelli’s death.

    [4] Comento di Christoforo Landino Fiorentino sopra La Comedia di Danthe Alighieri poeta fiorentino (‘Fiorentini eccellenti in dottrina’): ‘Ma dove lascio Baptista Alberti, o in che generatione di docti lo ripongo? Dirai tra’ physici. Certo affermo lui esser nato solo per investigare e secreti della natura. Ma quale spetie di mathematica gli fu incognita? Lui geometra. Lui arithmetico. Lui astrologo. Lui musico, et nella prospectiva maraviglioso più che huomo di molti secoli. Le quali tutte doctrine quanto in lui risplendessino manifesto lo dimostrono nove libri De architectura da llui divinissimamente scripti, e quali sono referti d’ogni doctrina, et illustrati di somma eloquentia. Scripse De pictura. Scripse De sculptura, el qual libro è intitolato Statua. Nè solamente scripse, ma di mano propria fece, et restano nelle mani nostre commendatissime opere di pennello, di scalpello, di bulino, et di gecto da llui facte.[get] [check: there’s a problem with the cameleon ref.  I seem to have the wrong source in Landino.  Check Mancini, below]  It is possible that, in likening Alberti to a cameleon, he was intending his reader to take up a hint that he was the Alcibiades of the liberal arts.  Alberti himself referred frequently to Alcibiades ability to adapt to differing circumstances and, in Book IV of De familia noted his cameleon character (Furlan, p.420, lines 2621-3).

    [5] See Girolamo Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, Roma, Bardi Editori, 1971, p.442: ‘ Dove lascio Battista Alberti o in che generatione di dotti lo ripongo? Dirai tra’ fisici; certo affermo lui esser nato per investigare e segreti della natura.  Ma quale spetie di matematica gli fu incognita?  Lui geometra, lui aritmetico. Lui astrologo, lui musico, et nella prospettiva maraviglioso più che huomo di molti secoli … come nuovo camaleonta sempre quello colore piglia, il quale è nella cosa, della quale scrive …in prosa ha avanzato et vinto tutti i superiori.’ [see note above –disparity]

    [6] Antonio Averlino (Filarete), Trattato di Architettura, facsimile p.42 [get]

    [7] Rykwert et al, p.1; Orlandi, L’Architettura, p.3. ‘Nullae quippe hunc hominem latuerunt quamlibet remotae litterae, quamlibet reconditae disciplinae.  Dubitare possis, utrum ad oratiam magis an ad poeticam factus, utrum gravior ille sermo fuerit an urbanior.  Ita perscrutatus antiquitatis vestigia est, ut omnem veterum architectandi rationem et deprehenderit et I  exemplum revocxaverit; sic ut non solum machinas et pegmata automataque permulta, sed formas quoque aedificiorum admirabilis excogitaverit.  Optimus praeterea et pictor et statuarius est habitus, cum tamen interim ita examussim teneret omnia, ut vix pauci singula.  Quare ego de illo, ut de Carthagine Sallustius, tacere satius puto quam pauca dicere.’

    [8] Manetti, p.54.  The Italian is as follows: ‘E la cagione del non estimare el perche era, perche in quel tenpo non era chi atendessi, ne era stato di centinaia d’anni innanzi chi auessi ateso al modo dello edificare antico; del quale se per alcuno autore nel tenp de gentilj se dato precetto, come ne nostrj di fecie Batista degli Alberti, poco si puo altro che delle chose generalj; ma le invenzione, che sono cose proprie del maestro, bisognia, che nella maggiore parte sieno date dalla natura o dalla industria sua propria.(p.55, l.380-86)

    [9] Manetti, p.43, l.156-57

    [10] lines 110, 530, 1050

    [11] Alberti, Ludi Rerum Mathematicarum, in Opere Volgari a cura di Cecil Grayson, Vol.III, Bari, Laterza, p.156

    [12] Manetti, lines.698-762

    [13] Manetti. p.76, l.766-771: ‘…e molto piu chiaramente e piu largo dicieva le cose a boccha a chi nel dimandaua, che n’ auessi qualche interesso e fussi atto a ricieuerlo, che non aueua dato per iscritto, per modo che in buona parte molti con amiratione pero ne furono capacj assaj; di che egli aquisto gradissima riputatione e fede, e predicauasi per tutto el marauiglioso ingiegnio e inteletto.’.

    [14] Manetti, p.43, lines 164-66:’… et insegniaua uolentierj acchi gli pareua, che lo disiderassi effusi atto a ricieruerlo.’

    [15] Manetti, p.29. l.421-530: cf. Alberti De re aedificatoria, VI, 3

    [16] Alberti, loc.cit., p.451

    [17] It is unlikely that Alberti intended the reader to look for a modern exemplification of the contrast between Roman probity and Asiatic excess, but a comparison of the Palazzo Medici and the Palazzo would have found scale and mass in the one and, in the other, those qualities reined in by the severe discipline of the orders.

    [18] Manetti, p.42, l.150-57: ‘Ed è piu forte, che non si sa, se que dipintorj di centinaia d’annj indietro … se lo sapeuano e se lo feciono con ragione.  Ma se pure lo feciono con regola … chi lo potesse insegniare alluj, era morto di centinaia d’anni, e iscritto non si truoua, e se si truoua, non e intesu.  Ma la sua industria e sottiglieza o ella la rirtuouo o ella ne fu inuentrice.’

    [19] Manetti, p.52, l.345-7: ‘E vide e medito molte belle cose, che da quel tenpo antico innanzi che furono que buonj maestrj in qua non s’erano uedute per altrj che se ne auessi notitia.’

    [20] Manetti (p.53, l.358-67) records, but does not explain the function of the strips of parchment upon which Brunelleschi registered heights of structures with numbers and characters during his survey of Roman ruins.  It is tempting to think that at a future stage, these calibrations would be transferred to the edges of a picture plane and would somehow generate a measured perspective of the ancient structure.

    [21] Orlandi,  L’Architettura, I,9. p.69,

    [22]Grayson, III, De pictura, p.11, para 1

    [23] Op.cit., p.87, para 48

    [24] Op.cit., p.107, para 63

    [25] Leonis Baptistae Alberti, De equo animante, testo latino, introduzione e note a cura di Cecil Grayson, Revisione generale a cura di Franceco Furlan, Albertiana, 1999, Vol.II, Section 15, p.232ff

    [26] Leon Battista Alberti, I Libri della Famiglia, a cura di Ruggiero Romano e Alberti Tenenti; Nuova edizione a cura di Franceco Furlan, Einaudi: Torino, 1994p.101-2, l.21-2: he would like to hear more on the subject of amicizia, ‘quali cominciasti ad amplificare con altro ordine e con altro piacevolissimo modo che a me non pare soleano gli antichi scrittori.’

    [27] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.349, l.741-3

    [28] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.353-54, l.849-857: ‘Ne io a te negherei, Lionardo, e’ precetti antiqui assai essere utilissimi, ne pero to conceredro che in questo artificio siano quanto vi desidero scrittori molto copiosi; gia che oggi, come tu sai, troviamo in questa materia de’ nostri scrittori non molti piu che solo Cicerone, e in qualche epsitola Seneca; e de’ Greci hanno Aristotele, Luciano.  E questi non li biasimo, ma ne molto in questa parte credo altri che io gli lodassi, a cui sempre qualunque scrittore fu in reverenza e ammirazione.’

    [29] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.373, l.1369-70

    [30] Romano, Tenenti, Furlan, p.417, l.2543

    [31] My Albertiana piece [get]

    [32]Rykwert et al, VII, 4, p.196; Orlandi, L’Architettura, p. 549: ‘Templi partes sunt porticus et cella interior…’

    [33] Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VIII,9

    [34] Tavernor [get], Braghirolli or Gaye?

  • 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)