Leon Battista Alberti at the Millennium. (Review Essay).

Leon Battista Alberti: Congres International, Paris, 10-15 avril 1995. Actes edites par Francesco Furlan. 2 vols. Paris: J. Vrin; Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2000. 1123 PP. + 108 plates. $95. ISBN: 2-7116-4499-2.

Leon Battista Alberti. Descriptio urbis Romae. Edition critique, traduction et commentaire par Martine Furno et Mario Carpo. Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance, vol. 56. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2000. 196 pp. n.p. ISBN: 2-600-00396-7.

Luca Boschetto. Leon Battista Alberti e Firenze: biografia, storia, letteratura. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000. xv + 334 pp. Lire 70,000. ISBN: 88-222-4898-8.

Anthony Grafton. Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. xi + 417 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-8090-9752-4.

Ingomar Lorch. Die Kirchenfassade in Italien von 1450 his 1527: Die Grundlagen durch Leon Battista Alberti und die Weiterentwicklung des basilikalen Fassadenspiegels his zum Sacco di Roma. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1999. 241 pp. + 52 plates. n.p. ISBN: 3-487-10872-0.

Michel Paoli. L'idde de nature chez Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 1999. 285 pp. n.p. ISBN: 2-7453-0222-1.

In a celebrated passage, Cristoforo Landino compared Leon Battista Alberti (1404-74) to a chameleon for his adaptable versatility; and Alberti himself employed animal symbolism in his Apologues and Dinner Pieces, even refashioning his identity by adding the name Leo ("lion") to his Christian name Battista. It is hardly surprising, then, that attempts to describe this multi-faceted genius recall the celebrated Indian parable of the elephant and the six blind men: when asked to describe this enormous beast, each of the men grasped a different part of it and thus proposed a different interpretation. This is nor to say that the half-dozen scholars reviewed here are shortsighted, but simply to stress that most approaches to this Protean figure concentrate on but a single part of the whole. The comparison might have pleased Alberti, on whom the symbolic potential of the elephant was not lost. His dinner piece The Spider (Aranea) portrays an elephant as an arrogant colossus, and in Rings (Anuli) an elephant's ear is interpreted as an emblem of aural receptivity. He also wrote a Latin apologue (now lost) called "The Elephant," as we learn from a letter of Francesco Cattani da Diacceto, which was brought to light by Francesco Furlan and Sylvain Matton in the 1993 issue of Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance.

Scholars who study Alberti face daunting obstacles and mysterious lacunae. To begin with, Alberti's birth in Genoa in 1404 gave him a marginal position in the society of Renaissance Italy. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the Alberti family had been exiled from their native Florence; and one of the leading bankers of the Alberti clan, Lorenzo, sought refuge in Genoa, where the family had a branch office. Through a liaison with a Genoese woman, Lorenzo begot two illegitimate sons, Battista and Carlo. One might conjecture that Battista regarded being the son of a Tuscan exile as a sort of distinction: the paragon of humanists, Petrarch, and his brother Gherardo, were born in Arezzo because, like Dante, their father had been exiled from Florence in 1302. But although by law it was possible to legitimize his sons, Lorenzo never took the trouble; and when he died in 1424, Battista had little defense against the unscrupulous cousins who usurped his inheritance. The stigma of illegitimacy thus made Alberti an outsider who would constantly seek to shape and define his own identity, not least by assuming the name Leo (Lion) and by adopting as his motto Virgil, Eclogues 10.28: Quid tum (si frcus Amyntas)? ("So what, if Amyntas is dark-skinned?").

All the same, Battista received good schooling, studying with the Ciceronian schoolmaster Barzizza in Padua, and advancing to law school in Bologna. But he never quite belonged to the Albertis, and had to seek a familia and employment elsewhere. With a double degree in hand, in both canon and civil law, he found these in the papal Curia around 1432, the year when the exile of the Alberti clan was revoked in Florence. A sort of international think-tank, the papal Curia was restlessly itinerant in the early Quattrocento, as the papacy found it difficult to regain its Roman seat after the debilitating strife of the Great Schism. By 1434, Alberti was in Florence, which would constitute his home base until 1443. In Florence, Alberti was stimulated by recent innovations in the visual arts, and soon he was experimenting with perspective and writing about painting. He also came into contact with Tuscan humanists, some of whom advocated using the vernacular as well as Latin. Battista set to work writing about his fami ly in a learned Italian dialogue, but his first attempts at Tuscan prose proved to be as awkward as his relations with his family, and he had to recruit Florentine friends as copy editors.

Travels with the Curia introduced him to various Northern Italian courts; and artistic commissions in Ferrara, Rimini, and Mantua led to increasingly monumental achievements in architecture, a subject on which he wrote the first treatise since antiquity. But here too his presence is shadowy, since he often directed projects at a distance. Another feature distinguishes Alberti from many of his contemporary humanists. With the exception of the more ambitious De familia, De re aedificatoria, and Momus, he wrote mostly single opuscula which as pieces d'occasion enjoyed only a limited circulation. Alberti made no translations from Greek, wrote no history (apart from a letter on the conspiracy of Stefano Porcari), and never collected his works or letters. Typically, when he assembled some his Intercenales, which were to undergo a codicological diaspora, he wrote vaguely: "I have begun (cepi) to collect my Dinner Pieces into short books." (In his 1465 treatise on cryptography, he alludes to the recent invention of p rinting: had Alberti lived longer -- he died in 1472 -- one imagines that he might have tried his hand at the new craft.) In the years following his death, many of his works were either lost or misattributed; and as he was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, his zealous editors Bonucci and Mancini took considerable liberties with the texts they published. Between 1960 and 1973, the late Cecil Grayson produced a three-volume critical edition of the Italian writings, but not all of Alberti's vast and varied Latin output has been so fortunate.

Alberti's literary fortunes in part reflect his status as an outsider. His alienation from the Alberti clan, his cool reception in Florentine society, and his geographical rootlessness (he never married) made him at home nowhere but eager to succeed everywhere. He remains crucial to our conception of the Renaissance precisely because he was driven to forge his own identity. In 1438, he composed a succinct Vita about himself in Latin, which he wrote in the third person, following the classical model of Xenophon and Caesar. This autobiography was often considered the work of a close friend and admirer, and this interpretation was perhaps encouraged by the author's common strategy of employing pseudonyms like Lepidus and Philoponius. But its striking portrait of the humanist as philosopher, artist, and multi-talented prodigy proved irresistible to Jacob Burckhardt, who helped establish the term "universal man" in the vocabulary of Renaissance studies. (Yet even here Alberti's originality betrays its classical or igins. In their edition of the Vita, Riccardo Fubini and Anna Menci Gallorini point out the Roman precedent for Alberti's versatility in the description of Cato the Elder's versatile ingenium found in Livy, History of Rome 39.40.5. The expression is also applied to the philosopher Bion by Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 4.47, in the Latin translation of Ambrogio Traversari which Alberti knew and used.)

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a veritable boom in the study of this versatile genius. An international congress held in Paris in 1995, whose proceedings are briefly reviewed below, led to the forming of the Societe Internationale Leon Battista Alberti (SILBA). In 1998, SILBA began to print its official journal Albertiana, and Robert Tavernor published On Alberti and the Art of Building. The next two years saw the publication of the volumes reviewed here.

The most ambitious of these books is Anthony Grafton's Leon Battista Alberti, an intellectual biography of the humanist that complements and updates Joan Gadol's groundbreaking 1969 study. The study originated as a series of lectures delivered at Columbia and, while Grafton is particularly sensitive to the humanist's use of classics, he sees important connections with the Quattrocento society and the visual arts. But if Grafton, like Alberti an omnivorous polymath, succeeds in negotiating much of this elephantine task, the reader should bear in mind one caveat. The subtitle of the book, "Master Builder," no doubt suggested by the publisher, misleadingly suggests that the book emphasizes Alberti's architecture. Yet it is precisely this topic which remains marginal to Grafton's wide purview: for Alberti's architectural projects, readers must turn to Tavernor's On Alberti and the Art of Building, as well as to Lorch's monograph and the volumes edited by Furlan, cited below.

In nine well-crafted chapters, Grafton traces the various stages of Alberti's creative life, from his allegorical quest for identity in the 1430s to the architectural projects and urban planning of his later years. Grafton sees Alberti's career as epitomizing the "transformation of the Italian urban world," and as reflecting the latest developments in humanism and the visual arts. Although the illegitimate and embittered Alberti often seems a maverick in Quattrocento culture, Grafton's deep knowledge of scholarship and art enables him to make revelatory connections between the humanist and his society, from Florentine patrons and the papal Curia to Northern Italian courts, and to shed light on lesser known contemporaries who moved in the same circles.

Chapter one, "Who Was Leon Battista Alberti?," reviews Alberti scholarship from Burckhardt to the present, and (like Burckhardt) focuses on Alberti's 1438 Life, a third-person autobiography modeled on the classical commentaries of Xenophon and Caesar. Chapter two, "Humanism: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Scholarship," traces Alberti's progress from the Ciceronian and Petrarchan ideals to his early years as a papal scribe in the 1430s. Chapter three, "From New Technologies to Fine Arts," uses the preface to the treatise On Painting as a point of departure in discussing Alberti's optical experiments and his invention of visual emblems; while chapter four, "On Painting," provides a close reading of the treatise itself as a humanist handbook. Grafton proceeds in chapter five, "Interpreting Florence," to examine Alberti's relationship to the Florentine mercantile society described in his Italian dialogue On the Family. Chapter six, "The Artist at Court: Alberti in Ferrara," relates how the Este court reshape d Alberti's identity as the "lionizing" courtier of duke Leonello, and paved the way to later architectural commissions. In chapter seven, "His Lost City," Grafton discusses Alberti's antiquarian enthusiasms and projects; while chapter eight, "Alberti on the Art of Building," examines the humanist's monumental and influential treatise on architecture. The final chapter, "The Architect and City Planner," summarizes Alberti's various artistic projects after 1450, from individual churches to Roman city planning. A brief epilogue offers remarks on Alberti's final years and legacy.

Mastering an enormously wide and varied bibliography, Grafton has produced a composite portrait of Alberti that is both readable and provocative. Besides adding to our picture of the philologist and antiquarian, he illuminates several of Alberti's artistic achievements, including his contributions to vanishing-point perspective, symbolic emblems, and camera obscura experiments (the endpapers of the volume include miniatures by Giovanni Bettini da Fano that exemplify such optical studies). Plotting the humanist's biographical and cultural coordinates with magisterial ease and accuracy, Grafton provides the reader with a three-dimensional picture of this often elusive figure. If it is not the complete Alberti, it is a convincing reproduction, and one presented in a vivid recreation of his original habitat.

In turn, several European scholars have produced more specialized monographs on Alberti that examine only part of the organic original. By its very title, Michel Paoli's L'idee de nature chez Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) evokes the tradition of Paul-Henri Michel's La pense'e de Leon Battista Alberti (Paris, 1930). Paoli has shrewdly chosen an idee fixe which unites Alberti's seemingly disparate oeuvre, which he divides generally into moral works, artistic treatises, and ludic writings.

Articulated in a thesis-like series of short sections, the book consists of an introductory section and two main parts. In "Preliminaires: Alberti et le recours a la philosophie," Paoli emphasizes Alberti's skeptical attitude toward speculation, in which nature emerges as a criterion of reality. The first major part of the study, "La place de la nature dans la pensee d'Alberti," analyzes the role played by Nature in Alberti's thought, with particular emphasis on religious and philosophical questions. Addressing the "problem of religion" in Alberti (who thus seems to prefigure Rabelais), Paoli discusses the humanist's distance from orthodox views, as reflected in his satire of ecclesiastical institutions and in his avoidance of overtly Christian language and references. In Alberti's ethical writings, the concept of nature generally appears in secular contexts, as in the traditional opposition between nature and fortune. In the second major part, "Le recours a la nature dans la reflexion d'Alberti," Paoli exami nes two complementary branches of Alberti's thought, the socio-political and the esthetic, in which "nature" is a catchword for harmony and aptness within a moral or artistic system.

In a famous passage of the Profrgia ab erumna, Alberti celebrates the humanist project as an intellectual mosaic that assembles fragments of learning into a new and harmonious composition. Like others, Paoli exploits this as a metaphor of Alberti's thought, and his monograph can indeed be read as a mosaic of Albertian citations on the topos of nature. What emerges from Alberti's non-satirical dialogues and treatises is the supremacy of nature conceived as order and harmony (concinnitas). Such notions conjoin technical fields like art and architecture with humankind's ethical sphere, in which Alberti can praise both one's personal virtue and an ideal villa for their harmony with nature. The connections between art, the individual, and society are evident in such "natural" metaphors as that of Alberti's Fatum et Fortuna, in which the liberal arts appear as life-saving devices in the torrent of life. Paoli notes that Nature is often portrayed as a positive counterpart to disruptive Fortune, as well as a supreme principle of perfection of the real world.

The strength of Paoli's work lies in his wide-ranging survey of Alberti's thought. But in the end is Alberti's "idea" of nature a philosophical concept or a rhetorical metaphor? Despite scattered references to Cicero and to Quattrocento humanists, Paoli does not clearly situate Alberti's Nature within the rhetorical context of Hellenistic philosophy or Quattrocento humanism. Still, his analysis does much to establish a unifying theme in the often disparate production of Alberti the "chameleon," as if mapping an important segment of his DNA.

Perhaps the most rigorous paleontologists of Renaissance studies are its archival historians. Luca Boschetto's Leon Battista Alberti e Firenze, which grew out of a 1997 Pisa tesi di perfezionamento, sheds considerable light on both Alberti's life and writings, supplementing the classic biography by Girolamo Mancini with material discovered in the records of the Mercanzia (Merchants' Court) in the Archivio di Stato in Florence. Boschetto seems to be the first scholar to have made a systematic search of these records for evidence about Alberti.

The volume is divided into four parts. In Part I, "La famiglia Alberti alla fine dell' esilio," Boschetto gives a detailed picture of the family's history and finances with special emphasis on Florence and on the crisis of the Alberti "companies" outside Tuscany in 1437-39. There is a wealth of information on the extended familial and financial network of the Alberti clan from the late Trecento to the middle of the Quattrocento. Special attention is paid to events following the 1428 revocation of their exile -- a period illuminated by the new institution of the Florentine catasto. With rich documentation, Boschetto shows how slowly members of the family returned to Florence, and he sheds new light on the financial crisis of the late 1430s, adding to the work of Giovanni Ponte.

Part II, "Battista," constitutes a new biography of the humanist, which revises Mancini according to recent studies and Boschetto's own research. With the exception of Alberti's architectural projects, this portrait covers the entirety of Alberti's life in chapters on the young Alberti (1404-34), on his stays in Florence (1435-44), and on his later connections with the city (1445-72). Naturally, the second chapter discusses Alberti's advocacy of the vernacular, which culminated in the bitter outcome of the Certarne Coronario of 1441. Besides redating several of Alberti's writings, Boschetto highlights the financial and political background to which Alberti but indirectly alludes. His relations with prominent figures such as Leonardo Bruni, Agnolo Pandolfini, and Piero de' Medici here emerge from the shadows to suggest the role played by the "outsider" Alberti in the higher circles of Florentine politics and culture. Of particular interest is the fine analysis of Alberti's dialogue Profugia ab erumna, which re lates the literary role of the interlocutor Agnolo Pandolfini to the realities of Medicean politics. And there are new insights about several of Alberti's key friends -- litterati such as Francesco d'Altobianco Alberti, Leonardo Dati, Niccolo Cerretani, and Marco Parenti. The end of the chapter discusses Alberti's friendship with Landino and Lorenzo de' Medici, and offers interesting observations on the fortune of the humanist's work. Ironically, with the exception of the Theogenius, the Italian compositions associated with Florence suffered the greatest eclipse: Book II of De familia was attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini, while the poems and De iciarchia barely survived in manuscript.

Part III consists of over 100 pages and contains sixty documents concerning Alberti. Drawn from archival sources, they are preceded by brief synopses and accompanied by a critical apparatus. Part IV offers a rich bibliography and full index of names, including Alberti's single works. It is difficult to praise Boschetto too highly for providing so much new light, both documentary and interpretive, on the biographical details of this enigmatic figure.

In the anthropology of Renaissance studies, examining a single artifact can lead to important conclusions. As part of an ongoing project sponsored by the Paris-based Societe Internationale Leon Battista Alberti, Martine Furno and Mario Carpo present Alberti's Descriptio urbis Romae in a critical edition that features the original Latin text with a French translation and commentaries. (The French guise of Alberti should not surprise the modern reader, since French presses were among the first to vulgarize his amatory works in the later Quattrocento.) And the collaborators have rendered a great service in placing this important text within its cultural context.

Sometime toward the middle of the fifteenth century, Alberti surveyed the monuments of Rome and wrote a short tract with tables to allow others to plot his findings using polar coordinates based on the Capitoline Hill. His attempt represents a first in modern topography, but the text describing his method and its results survives in only six manuscripts and was not published until the nineteenth century. Yet despite its brevity, the text is of considerable interest, not only to cartographers, but also to Roman archaeologists who will find here a record of monuments extant before the extensive predations of High Renaissance popes.

The volume consists of three sections that help define the cultural context of this brief and ground-breaking opusculum. First, Martine Furno offers a detailed description of the six manuscript witnesses, a critical Latin text with appended notes, and a French translation. Second, there are two essays on the Descriptio and its cultural context, the first by Furno and the second by Mario Carpo (translated from an Italian essay that appeared in Albertiana). Carpo insists on the "rhetorical" nature of the work, while Furno examines Alberti's approach to the problem, stressing his debt to Ptolemy's Cosmographia (which he evidently knew in the early Quattrocento translation of Jacopo da Scarperia) and his adaptation of Ptolemaic terms such as aux, augis "apogee." Third, there are two appendices containing (1) references to classical monuments in Petrarch, Flavio Biondo, Poggio Bracciolini, and Giovanni Tortelli, and (2) French translations of the relevant passages from these humanists. The volume concludes with a bibliography, four illustrations, and an index.

All of the material presented here aids us in interpreting Alberti's singular project. The editors rightly stress that Alberti's Descriptio is not a treatise on surveying techniques, but rather a recipe for reproducing an existing survey in any dimensions desired. (Alberti seems to have surveyed the city by "triangulation" from a number of points, not just from the central Capitolium. This method is described in his Ludi mathematici, but he makes no reference to it in the Descriptio -- hence the editors' emphasis on his "rhetorical" approach in this tract.) Yet oddly enough, the edition fails to realize Alberti's instructions. To be sure, there are four illustrations of what might be called a "polar compass" -- two from Quattrocento codices and two partial photographs of the survey as realized by a Grenoble architect in 1990. But there is no complete image of the survey plotted using Alberti's method and data, and curious readers will have to return to the illustration provided by Orlandi and Vagnetti in thei r study of the work, which appeared in the Convegno internazionale indetto net V centenario di L.B. Alberti (Rome, 1974). It is as if an edition of the Musical Offering were content merely to analyze and reproduce Bach's canons without printing a score or realizing a performance of the work. Carpo asserts that "le texte de la Descriptio n'est pas le complement d'une image: il est l'ersatz d'un dessin, qu'il remplace" (73). But surely a list of polar coordinates must be translated into images, rather than into French. Not merely a "rhetorical" ekphrasis, Alberti's descriptio deserves to be transcribed visually as well as verbally.

The earliest modern excavations of antiquities were often a German endeavor, and the same holds true of art-historical approaches to humanist architecture. As his title suggests, Ingomar Lorch's Die Kirchenfassade in Italien von 1450 bis 1527: Die Grundlagen durch Leon Battista Alberti und die Weiterentwicklung des basilikalen Fassadenspiegels his zum Sacco di Roma offers a clearly focused study. Lorch proceeds from a well-known fact of Renaissance architecture, namely, that while Brunelleschi is responsible for new classicizing models of church construction, Alberti was the first to design church facades. In two of his most important commissions, the Tempio Malatestiano and Santa Maria Novella, Alberti treats the facade as applied decoration that is analogous to existing internal structures but uses different materials. In Lorch's view, these two churches establish the first of two patterns that influenced Renaissance facades, particularly in the period before 1500: notable examples of Albertian influence in clude San Michele in Isola in Venice, Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, and Santa Cristina in Bolsena. After that date, the second pattern was set by the colossal orders of Alberti's San Sebastiano and Sant'Andrea, both in Mantua, which inspired Santa Maria Annunziata in Roccaverano, the Sagra in Carpi, and various unrealized projects like the cathedral in Vigevano.

Lorch's study begins with a discussion of Alberti's four facades, including a lengthy discussion of the complex problems involved in reconstructing the architect's design for San Sebastiano. A series of succinct chapters on Tuscan, Venetian, and Roman churches demonstrate the influence of Albertian facades before 1500. Next, several chapters examine the development of the church facade in the early Cinquecento, together with two monumental projects -- the design competition for San Lorenzo in Florence (never realized), and early plans for the rebuilding of St. Peter's in Rome. Lorch's detailed analyses of over twenty-five church facades are supplemented by 51 black-and-white plates at the end of the volume. The entire study is written with such clarity that even a non-specialist can follow the argument.

Every industry creates its own professional organizations and plans regular meetings, and Alberti studies are no exception. The largest of the recent contributions to Alberti studies is the two-volume Leon Battista Alberti: Congres International, Paris, 10-15 avril 1995, edited by Francesco Furlan, which collects the proceedings of this (non-revolutionary) Parisian convention, grouping the papers in six sections: Biography, Autobiography, and Historical Context; Readings, Sources, and Culture; The Dialogues and "Ludi"; Art and Technical Treatises; Architecture and Urban Planning: Theory and Practice; and Influence and Fortune. (The website for SILBA is www.silba.msh-paris.fr, and a bibliography can be found at http://www.ourworld.compuserve. com/ homepages/mpaoli.)

The sheer variety and bulk of these volumes -- more than fifty papers filling more than a thousand pages -- make it impossible to review them here, but readers interested in Alberti will find valuable contributions here on nearly every aspect of his life and work. Naturally, there are essays by some of the usual suspects: Luca Boschetto on the Alberti bank crisis of the 1430s, Michel Paoli on portraits of the humanist, and the present writer's discussion of Apuleius and Alberti. It is an invidious task to single out particularly fine contributions, but special mention should be made of Arturo Calzona on Alberti and Ludovico Gonzaga, Paolo Viti on Alberti and Medici politics, and Florence Vuilleumier on astronomy and the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo.

As we enter the new millennium, then, Alberti studies are proliferating at an auspicious rate. We may not yet know everything about this colossal figure, but the picture is increasingly detailed and fascinating.