Leon
Battista Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti, (b. Feb.
14, 1404, Genoa—d. April 25, 1472, Rome), Italian humanist,
architect, and principal initiator of Renaissance art theory. In
his personality, works, and breadth of learning, he is
considered the prototype of the Renaissance “universal man.”
Childhood and education
The society and class into which Alberti was born endowed
him with the intellectual and moral tendencies he was to
articulate and develop over a lifetime. He belonged to one of
the wealthy merchant-banker families of Florence. At the time of
his birth, the Alberti were in exile, expelled from Florence by
the oligarchical government then dominated by the Albizzi
family. Alberti’s father, Lorenzo, was managing the family’s
concerns in Genoa, where Battista was born. Shortly thereafter
he moved to Venice, where he raised Battista (Leo or Leon was a
name adopted in later life) and his elder brother, Carlo. Both
sons were illegitimate, the natural offspring of Lorenzo and a
Bolognese widow, but they were to be Lorenzo’s only children and
his heirs. An affectionate and responsible father, Lorenzo
provided his sons with a Florentine stepmother (whom he married
in 1408), and he attended carefully to their education.
It was from his father that
Battista received his mathematical training. The useful
intellectual tools of the businessman inspired in him a lifelong
love for the regular, for rational order, and a lasting delight
in the practical application of mathematical principles.
“Nothing pleases me so much,” Alberti was to have a figure in
one of his dialogues remark, “as mathematical investigations and
demonstrations, especially when I can turn them to some useful
practice as Battista here did, who drew from mathematics the
principles of painting [perspective] and also his amazing
propositions on the moving of weights.” As in Leonardo da
Vinci’s case, mathematics led Alberti into several seemingly
disparate fields of learning and practice. At one stroke, it
resolved a diversity of problems and awakened an appreciation of
the rational structure and processes of the physical world.
His early formal education was
humanistic. At the age of 10 or 11, Alberti was sent to boarding
school in Padua. There he was given the classical Latin training
that was to be denied to Leonardo, illegitimate son of a poor
notary in a rustic village of Tuscany. The “new learning” was
largely literary, and Alberti emerged from the school an
accomplished Latinist and literary stylist. Relishing his skill
as a classicist, he wrote a Latin comedy at the age of 20 that
was acclaimed as the “discovered” work of a Roman playwright—and
was still published as a Roman work in 1588 by the famous
Venetian press of Aldus Manutius. But it was the content rather
than the form of the classical authors that absorbed Alberti as
a youth and throughout his life. As for most humanists, the
literature of ancient Rome opened up for him the vision of an
urbane, secular, and rational world that seemed remarkably
similar to the emerging life of the Italian cities and met its
cultural needs. He brought his own emotional and intellectual
tendencies to “the ancients,” but from them he drew the
conceptual substance of his thought.
Alberti completed his formal
education at the University of Bologna in an apparently joyless
study of law. His father’s death and the unexpected seizure of
his legacy by certain members of the family brought him grief
and impoverishment during his seven-year stay at Bologna, but he
persisted in his studies. After receiving his doctorate in canon
law in 1428, he chose to accept a “literary” position as a
secretary rather than pursue a legal career. By 1432 he was a
secretary in the Papal Chancery in Rome (which supported several
humanists), and he had a commission from a highly placed
ecclesiastical patron to rewrite the traditional lives of the
saints and martyrs in elegant “classical” Latin. From this point
on, the church was to provide him with his livelihood. He took
holy orders, thus receiving in addition to his stipend as a
papal secretary an ecclesiastical benefice, the priory of
Gangalandi in the diocese of Florence, and some years later
Nicholas V conferred upon him as well the rectory of Borgo San
Lorenzo in Mugello. Although he led an exemplary, and apparently
a celibate, life, there is almost nothing in his subsequent
career to remind one of the fact that Alberti was a churchman.
His interests and activities were wholly secular and began to
issue in an impressive series of humanistic and technical
writings.
Contribution to philosophy, science, and the arts
The treatise “Della famiglia” (“On the Family”), which he
began in Rome in 1432, is the first of several dialogues on
moral philosophy upon which his reputation as an ethical thinker
and literary stylist largely rests. He wrote these dialogues in
the vernacular, expressly for a broad urban public that would
not be skilled in Latin: for the non litteratissimi cittadini,
as he called them. Based upon classical models, chiefly Cicero
and Seneca, these works brought to the day-to-day concerns of a
bourgeois society the reasonable counsel of the ancients—on the
fickleness of fortune, on meeting adversity and prosperity, on
husbandry, on friendship and family, on education and obligation
to the common good. They are didactic and derivative, yet fresh
with the tone and life-style of the Quattrocento (the 1400s). In
Alberti’s dialogues the ethical ideals of the ancient world are
made to foster a distinctively modern outlook: a morality
founded upon the idea of work. Virtue has become a matter of
action, not of right thinking. It arises not out of serene
detachment but out of striving, labouring, producing.
This ethic of achievement,
which corresponds to the social reality of his youth, found
ready acceptance in the urban society of central and northern
Italy in which Alberti moved after 1434. Travelling with the
papal court of Eugenius IV to Florence (the ban of exile against
his family was lifted with the restoration of Medici influence),
Bologna, and Ferrara, Alberti made several congenial and
fruitful contacts. The writings, both the Latin and vernacular
ones, that he dedicated to his new associates are imbued with
his characteristic notions of work, practice, and productive
activity; and he took upon himself in turn the technical and
practical problems that were absorbing his friends and patrons.
In Florence his close associations with the sculptor Donatello
and the architect Brunelleschi led to one of his major
achievements: the systematization of the painter’s perspective.
The book On Painting, which he wrote in 1435, set forth for the
first time the rules for drawing a picture of a
three-dimensional scene upon the two-dimensional plane of a
panel or wall. It had an immediate and profound effect upon
Italian painting and relief work, giving rise to the correct,
ample, geometrically ordered space of the perspectival
Renaissance style. Later perspectival theorists, such as the
painter Piero della Francesca and Leonardo, elaborated upon
Alberti’s work, but his principles remain as basic to the
projective science of perspective as Euclid’s do to plane
geometry.
His friendship with the
Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli was of comparable
practical and scientific importance. It was Toscanelli who
provided Columbus with the map that guided him on his first
voyage. Alberti seems to have collaborated with him in astronomy
rather than geography, but the two sciences were closely bound
at the time (and bound to perspective) by the conceptions and
methods of geometric mapping rediscovered in the writings of the
ancient astronomer and geographer Ptolemy. Alberti’s distinctive
contribution to this current of thought took the form of a small
treatise on geography, the first work of its kind since
antiquity. It sets forth the rules for surveying and mapping a
land area, in this case the city of Rome, and it was probably as
influential as his earlier treatise on painting. Although it is
difficult to trace the historical connections, the methods of
surveying and mapping and the instruments described by Alberti
are precisely those that were responsible for the new scientific
accuracy of the depictions of towns and land areas that date
from the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
At the Este court in Ferrara,
where Alberti was first made a welcome guest in 1438, the
Marchese Leonello encouraged (and commissioned) him to direct
his talents toward another field of endeavour: architecture.
Alberti’s earliest effort at reviving classical forms of
building still stands in Ferrara, a miniature triumphal arch
that supports an equestrian statue of Leonello’s father.
Leonello inspired a great humanistic undertaking as well as a
mode of artistic practice on Alberti’s part by urging him to
restore the classic text of Vitruvius, architect and
architectural theorist of the age of the Roman emperor Augustus.
With customary thoroughness, Alberti embarked upon a study of
the architectural and engineering practices of antiquity that he
continued when he returned to Rome in 1443 with the papal court.
By the time Nicholas V became pope in 1447, Alberti was
knowledgeable enough to become the Pope’s architectural adviser.
The collaboration between Alberti and Nicholas V gave rise to
the first grandiose building projects of Renaissance Rome,
initiating among other works the reconstruction of St. Peter’s
and the Vatican Palace. As the Este prince was now dead, it was
to Nicholas V that Alberti dedicated in 1452 the monumental
theoretical result of his long study of Vitruvius. This was his
De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture), not a restored
text of Vitruvius but a wholly new work, that won him his
reputation as the “Florentine Vitruvius.” It became a bible of
Renaissance architecture, for it incorporated and made advances
upon the engineering knowledge of antiquity, and it grounded the
stylistic principles of classical art in a fully developed
aesthetic theory of proportionality and harmony.
During the final 20 years of
his life, Alberti carried out his architectural ideas in several
outstanding buildings. The facades of Sta. Maria Novella and the
Palazzo Rucellai, both executed in Florence for the merchant
Giovanni Rucellai, are noted for their proportionality, their
perfect sense of measure. They are worthy successors to the art
of Brunelleschi, initiator of the Florentine Quattrocento style
of architecture. Other buildings look forward to the 16th
century, particularly to Donato Bramante, the architect of St.
Peter’s. The classical severity of Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano,
commissioned by Sigismondo Malatesta, the ruler of Rimini, and
the new sense of volume and amplitude of the majestic Church of
San Andrea, which he designed for Ludovico Gonzaga, the humanist
Marquess of Mantua, announce the fullness of the High
Renaissance style. Alberti was not only the foremost theorist of
Renaissance architecture: he had become one of its great
practitioners as well.
Architecture preoccupied him
during the 1450s and 1460s, and he traveled a great deal to the
various cities and courts of Renaissance Italy, but Rome and
Florence remained his intellectual homes, and he continued to
cultivate the interests they had always stimulated. In Rome,
where republican life was precluded by the papal government, he
was absorbed by technical and scientific matters. His response
to certain problems entertained by members of the Papal Chancery
led to two highly original works in this category. One is a
grammar book, the first Italian grammar, by which he sought to
demonstrate that the Tuscan vernacular was as “regular” a
language as Latin and hence worthy of literary use. The other is
a pioneer work in cryptography: it contains the first known
frequency table and the first polyalphabetic system of coding by
means of what seems to be Alberti’s invention, the cipher wheel.
Although he had been dismissed from the Papal Chancery in 1464
because of the retrenchment ordered by Pope Paul II, Alberti
undertook this study, of obvious importance to the papacy, at
the request of a friend who stayed on as a papal secretary.
In all his projects, Alberti
employed his intellectual gifts in some “useful” work—useful to
the artistic, cultivated, and courtly circles in which he moved,
including painters and builders, mapmakers and astronomers,
humanists, princes, and popes. In all of his work, his
versatility remained bound to the social outlook that
characterized the “civic Humanism” of Florence.
It is fitting that his final
and finest dialogue should be set in Florence and be written in
the clear Tuscan prose he had helped to regularize and refine.
Although the republicanism of Florence was now eclipsed, and
Alberti now moved as a familiar in the circle of the princely
Lorenzo de’ Medici, De iciarchia (“On the Man of Excellence and
Ruler of His Family”) represents in full flower the
public-spirited Humanism of the earlier bourgeois age to which
he belonged. Alberti is its chief protagonist, and no more
appropriate figure is conceivable. For this dialogue, more than
any other, celebrates the union of theory and practice that
Florentine Humanism had attained and the ethic of achievement
and public service that he himself had come to exemplify. De
iciarchia was completed just a few years before his death. He
died “content and tranquil,” according to the 16th-century
biography by Giorgio Vasari.
Assessment
Alberti was in the vanguard of the cultural life of early
Renaissance Italy. He has been admired for his many-sided
nature, as has Leonardo da Vinci, who followed him by half a
century and resembles him in this respect. Yet in Alberti’s
case, unity as much as versatility typifies the man and his
accomplishments. Leonardo’s genius carried him further than
Alberti: he saw more and saw more deeply. But Leonardo’s vision
has a “modern,” fragmentary character, whereas Alberti attained
a completeness in thought and life that fulfilled the
Renaissance ideals of measure and harmony. His intellectual and
artistic pursuits were all of a piece, and he struck a unique
balance between theory and practice, realizing this dominant
aspiration of his age at the very moment social and political
events had begun to cause it to fade.
Joan Kelly-Gadol
