Alberti, Leon Battista

ALBERTI, LEON BATTISTA. - Humanist, b. in 1404, perhaps in Genoa, into a Florentine family exiled from its homeland; d. in Rome in 1472. A. is one of the loftiest personalities of humanism for the versatility of his genius, which led him to investigate every field of human knowledge.

1. PEDAGOGY

Set by his father to physical exercises, in order to strengthen his body, and to the study of letters, A. attended as a boy the school of Gasparino Barzizza. After his father's death, he moved to Bologna, where he undertook the study of canon law, though without ever abandoning that of letters (particularly Greek), following the lectures of Francesco Filelfo. Barely twenty years old, he composed in Latin prose a comic jest entitled Philodoxios, or the lover of glory, which Poggio Bracciolini calls written senum eloquentia ac venustate and which some others believed to be and printed as a work of an ancient Latin comic poet. The jest, under its allegorical guise, representing A. himself, proves how the industrious and studious man can attain glory on a par with the rich. Around the age of twenty-four, A. also devoted himself to the study of physics and mathematics. In 1428 the Alberti family was able to return to Florence at the request of Pope Martin V, and Leon Battista was thus able to see the city of his forebears. Certainly the Florentine environment must have attracted him: Florence was in fact not only the city of the great masters in the various arts, but nurtured in its bosom the best humanists of the time and was also rich in commerce and industries. Florence embodied, in short, a rich and varied popular life, and it certainly must have influenced the formation of the young A., in whose thought the humanistic ideal merges, indeed is realized, in an ideal of practical life, and the man of liberal culture is enriched by the positive values of life. Opposed, after his father's death, by his relatives because he did not wish to devote himself to commerce, feeling himself called to another office, A. entered at the age of 24 into the service of Card. Albergati and then into that of the papal court, at which it seems he held, from as early as 1432, the office of apostolic abbreviator: an office he kept until 1464. He was with the pontiff Eugene IV in Florence at the time of the Council (1434-36), in Bologna and in Ferrara, coming into contact with the best minds of the time. A. composed a series of works of a moral character that serve to make his pedagogical thought better known to us.

In the treatise Della famiglia, in particular, he gives us pedagogical norms concerning the education of children, norms which are, however, the very same as those ordinarily present in the humanistic tradition and drawn from the same sources - Cicero, Quintilian, Plutarch - from which humanism had drawn them and was drawing them. But this matters only up to a point, because what counts in A.'s work is the new spirit stirring within it, the vision he has of man's life.

In the treatise Della famiglia, A. feigns that around the deathbed of the father Lorenzo some relatives have gathered, to whom the father entrusts his sons Battista and Carlo. In the first book A. treats "of the duty of the old toward the young and of the younger toward their elders and of the education of children." The elders must be prudent and well-mannered toward the young; on the other hand, the young must respect and venerate the old. Parents must exercise great diligence in raising their children and in making them virtuous. The family is, for A., the center of the individual's life and the means through which he realizes himself. The family, insofar as it is founded on nature and on the bond of blood and on affection, is in Alberti's conception more important than the State, which, born from the union of several families, is founded on the interest of individuals and often therefore becomes a cause of division and hatred. Education therefore arises, for A., from the family. In the second book he speaks of marriage and of love as a source of happiness for spouses. A. exhorts to marriage by alluding to the goods that derive from it, not without however advising reflection on whether the girl one wishes to marry is well born and well educated, making the beauty of woman consist above all in her good morals. In the third book Giannozzo degli Alberti, a steward, is introduced to speak, and there is discussion of the most suitable way to provide for the life of the family. He teaches how one one ought to spend money, what use one should make of the soul,
of the body, of time, which are three things essentially
our own, what relations ought to exist between husband and
wife. She will attend to the house and be a good housekeeper; he
will provide for maintaining relations with men and for keeping
the family in honor and prosperity. The fourth book treats of
friendship, concerning which he cites the opinions of Pythagoras,
Plato, Aristotle. The friend is known in uncertain circumstances, and
the best means of acquiring friendship are the virtues,
civil living, noble bearing. The A. recommends keeping
flatterers at a distance and, when necessary, correcting
friends, and he clarifies in which cases it is fitting sometimes to sever
a friendship. The enemy is conquered by living honorably; injuries,
rather than removing, sharpen enmities.

Besides the treatise Della famiglia, the A. wrote a whole
series of moral works such as Della tranquillità dell'anima,
Teogenio, De Iciarchia, Intercenales, in which are reaffirmed
and often better developed and asserted the pedagogico-moral principles expressed in his major work. The dominant
note in the A.'s thought is that the end of human life
is action and exercise, and not speculation and contemplation. Not that contemplation and speculation are to be
banished, but they are insufficient when they do not bend
to what is the civil life of man, who
is what he wills to be, what his will makes him.
In the A., man becomes conscious of his own will and
of his own power. Man, insofar as he is will, is no longer subject to extraneous and superior forces, but makes himself master
of all spiritual and material reality. Virtue is not a
good that is outside us, but is in us, and he becomes virtuous who
wills to be virtuous. Man is the author of his own good and his
own evil, and it is useless, says the A., to pray to the gods that
they intervene to change those conditions which we, by
our action, have created. God does not derogate, for our
prayers, from the eternal order that he impressed upon things. If we
thought the contrary, it would mean that we thought the gods
« nobis homunculis persimiles ».

This almost Aristotelian rigidity of the divinity does not
make him feel — but one cannot say always — the warmth and the value
of prayer and of the relationship that man nonetheless feels and
perceives with God who is his father, and a merciful father.
Man is, for the A., the fruit of his will and his labor;
if the mastery of himself over himself is lacking in him, man becomes
the prey of fortune, which in itself has no reality,
but is that very thing which we will it to be. This thought,
present in the treatise Della famiglia, makes itself felt in
all his work.

Man, insofar as he is will, cannot be the prey of fortune, and this is an intuition already present in the
educationalists of humanism, but in the A. it took on its own
particular value and meaning, becoming almost the central
point around which all his thought moves.
And as it is in individuals, so it is in peoples. If in man,
as in nations, virtue reigns, everything else obeys
him. And virtue, to have it, it suffices to will it. Virtue is the fruit
of the exercise of the spirit which, through good acts, conquers and recognizes itself as good. If man neglects
good, manly and glorious works, « he remains wretched and most unhappy ».
Education, as can be seen, in the A., is identified
with exercise. Man is, insofar as he never rests and must always
perfect and improve himself; insofar as he makes himself
knower and master of the world, and through inquiries and investigations learns and affirms himself as
personality and as value. Now this knowing man does not
acquire from books or only from books, but is born from exercise
and from contact with men and with things. We are, insofar as we do. Education as the fruit of exercise
is a happy intuition in the A. and rich in consequences in
modern pedagogy.

Therefore virtue understood as our exercise, that is, as
our conquest, implies always living
and active participation in knowing, which is not [virtue] insofar as it becomes for us
an exterior ornament and vain pomp, but insofar as rather
it is our substance and our life and our blood. Hence
in his work Del Principe Gelasto, the A. caricatures
that type of man of letters whose learning has not served to
make him improve in life, to make him understand life as
action, as duty toward family and society. Charon,
therefore, rightly refuses to ferry Gelasto to the other shore
because his learning has been vain insofar as it did not
teach him to live well, but remained entirely outside and was not
translated into norm and conduct of life. The A. does not refuse
abstraction as inquiry; indeed he recognizes it as proper of human nature, and he feels the need to bring theory and practice together in a fruitful synthesis. The former has value insofar as it serves and assists the latter, because life is harmony, "bene beatoque vivere", and is realized in the perfect equilibrium of life. The body, therefore, as the instrument of the soul, must be kept healthy, beautiful, and agile so that through it man may accomplish the moral tasks he must fulfill in the family and in society. And just as man must love moral exercise, so must he pursue physical exercise through gymnastics, which "strengthens every virtue and sinew" and is "necessary for the young, useful for the old." And to gymnastics the A. adds play, which parents must permit and encourage. The games the A. wants must be "manly, honest, without any taint of vice or reproach." Sedentary games the A. does not want; the young should "shoot arrows, ride horses, and follow the other manly and noble games." This educational vision, which through physical exercise strengthens the young, does not make him lose sight of the other aspect of man's life, which is the formation of the mind. The A., as has been said, understands life as harmony, and if he censures a knowledge that is drawn away from life without feeling its profound demands, he cannot appreciate one who, having devoted himself solely to cultivating the life of the body, neglects that of the mind.

This love of letters as both means and end of the formation of the virtuous man led him to conceive a plan of studies which, in agreement with the other masters and pedagogues of his time, was based on the reading of the ancient orators, historians, and poets: Cicero, Livy, Sallust, Virgil, etc. Contrary, however, to the other pedagogues of his time, the A. did not reject the mother tongue from the education of the young, and he is one of the first Italians of the 15th century who was able to affirm the value of the vernacular, not only by writing several of his works in the Tuscan language, but by maintaining that if "the ancient Latin tongue" is very copious, "our Tuscan" has no reason to be held in such hatred.

To this end, that is, to the end of affirming or imposing the use of the vernacular, he made himself the promoter (1441), under the protection of the Medici, of the certame coronario, in which the A. himself participated with the fourth book Della famiglia, which treats, as we know, of friendship.

Nino Sammartano

2. ART

Besides works of a pedagogical-moral character, the A., a universal mind, wrote several works on painting and sculpture. The most important of these may be considered the treatise De re aedificatoria, which constitutes a personal and intentional reworking of that of the Roman Vitruvius. The De re aedificatoria is the first of the architectural treatises that culminate with the sixteenth-century ones of Serlio, Vignola, and Palladio. The A. was the most typical product of mature Florentine humanism, that is, the perspicacious and exceedingly acute dilettante who nourishes the intimate need to investigate everything and experience everything for the sole purpose of understanding and enjoying intellectually rather than producing. And just as he was a musician and athlete, moralist and architect, painter and mathematician — that is, just as he reduced doing and knowing to unity — so he preached that the practical translation of physical and mathematical science was necessary for the painter, and at the same time postulated that the true architect should only provide for the conception of his buildings, without ever descending to their practical execution. If all this — and it is the A.'s chief merit — definitively freed the figurative arts from the rank of "ars mechanica" where medieval convictions had in a certain sense kept them, on the other hand as an artist the A. fell short of his true task, which is to give concrete and finished form to his work. Indeed, his buildings were never completed by him: hence the difficulties of criticism in defining his personality, and hence too the label of "non-artist" that Schlosser, a rigid upholder of Crocean schemas, attributed to him (v. CRITICA D'ARTE). The A.'s first architectural undertaking was the transformation of the exterior of the medieval church of S. Francesco in Rimini (begun in 1450); the work was executed by the Veronese Matteo dei Pasti. In the facade, which remained unfinished, the A. adapts the schema of Roman triumphal arches to the requirements of the theme, creating the type of church facade with two superimposed orders and bearing witness to the contribution of knowledge of antiquity to the architecture of the Renaissance. On the sides, the series of deep arcades containing sarcophagi, while recalling the tombs leaning against medieval churches, is inspired by Roman aqueducts. According to the A.'s project, the church was to have a hemispherical dome.

In completing the Gothic facade of S. Maria Novella in Florence, the A. took up the schema of the two superimposed orders and created the "volute" between the upper part of the facade and the wider lower part. In Florence the A. carried out works in the church of S. Pancrazio, such as the entrance triforium, the free copy of the Holy Sepulchre, and others; in the church of the Annunziata the "tribune," a construction on a circular plan covered with a hemispherical dome and surrounded by chapels. The facade of the Palazzo Rucellai is attributed to him, characterized by the superimposition of the orders on the rusticated facing.

In Mantua, on the A.'s design, two churches were erected by the Florentine Luca Fancelli, S. Sebastiano (begun in 1460) and S. Andrea (begun in 1472), both free interpretations of Roman buildings, the first on a central plan, the second on a rectangular plan. The correspondence between exterior and interior, between structure and architectural elements, makes S. Andrea the most complete expression of Albertian architectural thought, pervaded with classical culture and grandeur. The church has a single nave, covered with a barrel vault, with side chapels, transept, dome, and apse. The rhythmic motif of the interior (alternation of arcades with wall piers framed between pilasters divided into several levels), which would be followed by Bramante for the arms of the cross in his project for S. Peter's, is taken up organically in the facade, the prototype of the sixteenth-century facades of a single order. Vignola, in the church of the Gesù in Rome, so widely imitated in the late sixteenth century and the early Baroque, would develop the planimetric and spatial concepts expressed in S. Andrea.

As a theorist and humanist, the A. in his works applies fifteenth-century forms to schemas and structures of Roman classicism, which he employed in an original way for the architectural themes of his time; with results that were above all followed after his death. - See Plates XLIX-LII.

Raffaello Niccoli