ALBERTI, LEON BATTISTA

ALBERTI, LEON BATTISTA. – Humanist, born in 1404, perhaps in Genoa, from a Florentine family in exile; died in Rome in 1472. L.B.A. is one of the most towering figures of Humanism due to the versatility of his intellect, which led him to explore every field of human knowledge.

I. PEDAGOGY

Introduced by his father to physical exercises, aimed at strengthening his body, and to the study of letters, L.B.A., as a young man, attended the school of Gasparino Barzizza. After his father’s death, he went to Bologna, where he began the study of canon law, though without ever abandoning the study of letters (particularly Greek), attending the lectures of Francesco Filelfo. At barely twenty, he composed in Latin prose a comic jest titled *Philodoxios*, or “The Lover of Glory,” which Poggio Bracciolini claimed was written *senum eloquentia ac venustate* and which some others believed and printed as the work of an ancient Latin comic. The jest, under its allegorical guise, representing L.B.A. himself, demonstrates how an industrious and studious man can, like the rich, attain glory. Around the age of twenty-four, L.B.A. also devoted himself to the study of physics and mathematics. In 1428, the Alberti family was able to return to Florence at the behest of Pope Martin V, and L.B.A. was thus able to see the city of his ancestors. Certainly, the Florentine environment must have attracted him: Florence was not only the city of great masters in the various arts but also nurtured within its walls the finest humanists of the time, and it was also rich in trade and industry. Florence thus embodied a rich and varied popular life, and it must certainly have influenced the formation of the young L.B.A., in whose thought the humanistic ideal fused, indeed was realized, in an ideal of practical life, and the man of liberal culture was enriched by the positive values of life.

Opposed, after his father’s death, by his relatives because he did not wish to engage in commerce—feeling himself called to another office—L.B.A. entered at twenty-four the service of Cardinal Albergati and then that of the papal court, at which he appears to have held, from 1432 onward, the office of Apostolic abbreviator, a position he maintained until 1464. He accompanied Pope Eugenius IV to Florence during the Council (1434–36), to Bologna, and to Ferrara, coming into contact with the finest minds of the time. L.B.A. composed a series of works of a moral character that help us better understand his pedagogical thought.

In the treatise *On the Family*, in particular, he sets forth pedagogical norms regarding the education of children, norms that, however, are those ordinarily present in the humanist tradition and drawn from the same sources—Cicero, Quintilian, Plutarch—from which Humanism itself drew them. But this is of secondary importance, for what matters in L.B.A.’s work is the new spirit that animates it, the vision he has of man’s life.

In the treatise *On the Family*, L.B.A. imagines that, at the deathbed of their father Lorenzo, several relatives gather, to whom the father entrusts his sons Battista and Carlo. In the first book, L.B.A. discusses “the duty of the elderly toward the young and of the younger toward the elders and the education of children.” The elders must be prudent and well-mannered toward the young, while the younger must respect and venerate their elders. Parents must take great care in raising their children and making them virtuous. For L.B.A., the family is the center of the individual’s life and the means by which he realizes himself. The family, founded as it is on nature, on the bond of blood, and on affection, is, in Alberti’s conception, more important than the state, which, arising from the union of many families, is based on individual interests and thus often becomes a cause of division and hatred. Education, therefore, for L.B.A., originates in the family.

The second book discusses marriage and love as a source of happiness for spouses. L.B.A. urges marriage, pointing out the benefits that derive from it, though he advises reflection on whether the young woman one wishes to marry is of good birth and well educated, emphasizing that a woman’s beauty consists above all in her good character. In the third book, Giannozzo degli Alberti, a steward, is introduced, and the discussion turns to the most suitable way to provide for the family’s livelihood. He teaches how money should be spent, what use should be made of animals, the body, and time—three things essentially our own—and what relations should obtain between husband and wife. She will manage the household and be a good housewife; he will ensure that relations with others are maintained and that the family is honored and prosperous. The fourth book treats friendship, citing the opinions of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. A friend is known in uncertain circumstances, and the best means of acquiring friendship are virtues, civil living, and noble conduct. L.B.A. advises keeping flatterers at bay and, when necessary, correcting friends, clarifying in which cases it may be advisable to sever a friendship. An enemy is overcome by living honestly; injuries, rather than diminishing enmities, sharpen them.

In the fourth book, too, the theme of *fortuna* (fortune) emerges, an intuition already present in humanist pedagogues, but in L.B.A. it takes on a particular value and meaning, becoming almost the central point around which his entire thought revolves. And just as it is in individuals, so it is in peoples. If virtue reigns in man, as in nations, everything else obeys II. And to have virtue, one need only will II. Virtue is the fruit of the exercise of the spirit, which, through good deeds, conquers and recognizes itself as good. If man neglects good, manly, and glorious works, “he remains wretched and most unhappy.” Education, as we see, in L.B.A., is identified with exercise. Man is, inasmuch as he never rests and must always perfect and improve himself; inasmuch as he becomes a knower and master of the world, and through inquiry and investigation learns and asserts himself as a personality and as a value. Now, this knowledge man does not acquire from books or solely from books, but it arises from exercise and from contact with men and things. *We are, inasmuch as we act.* Education as the fruit of exercise is a felicitous intuition in L.B.A. and one rich in consequences for modern pedagogy.

Thus, virtue, understood as our exercise—that is, as our conquest—implies a lively and active participation in knowledge, which is not merely an external adornment or vain display but rather our substance, our life, and our blood. Therefore, in his work *Del Principe Gelasto*, L.B.A. lampoons that type of scholar whose knowledge has not served to improve him 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 knowledge has been in vain, inasmuch as it did not teach him how to live well but remained entirely external and was not translated into rule and conduct of life. L.B.A. does not reject abstraction as a form of inquiry; on the contrary, he recognizes it as proper

Besides the treatise *Della famiglia*, the author wrote an entire series of moral works such as *Della tranquillità dell'anima*, *Teogenio*, *De Iciarchia*, and *Intercenales*, in which the pedagogical and moral principles expressed in his major work are reiterated and often further developed and affirmed. The dominant note in the author’s thought is that the end of human life is action and exertion, not speculation and contemplation. Not that contemplation and speculation are to be banished, but they are insufficient unless they are directed toward what constitutes human civil life, namely, the life that a person wills to be and becomes through his own volition. In the author’s view, man acquires consciousness of his own will and power. As a being of will, man is no longer subject to external and superior forces but becomes the master of all spiritual and material reality. Virtue is not a good that lies outside us; it resides within us, and whoever wills to be virtuous becomes virtuous. Man is the author of his own good and evil, and it is useless, the author says, to pray to the gods to alter those conditions which we ourselves, through our actions, have created. God does not deviate from the eternal order He impressed upon things in response to our prayers. If we were to think otherwise, we would be imagining the gods as “nobis homunculis persimiles.”

This almost Aristotelian rigidity of the deity does not always allow him to feel the warmth and value of prayer and the relationship that man nonetheless senses and experiences with God as his Father, and a merciful Father. Man, for the author, is the fruit of his will and labor; if he lacks self-mastery, he becomes prey to fortune, which in itself has no reality but is precisely what we ourselves make it to be. This idea, present in the treatise *Della famiglia*, permeates his entire work.

Man, as a being of will, cannot be prey to fortune, and this is an intuition already present among humanist educators, but in the author it assumes a particular value and significance, becoming almost the central point around which his entire thought revolves. And as it is in individuals, so it is in peoples. If virtue reigns in man, as in nations, everything else submits to II. And to possess virtue, one need only will II. Virtue is the fruit of the exercise of the spirit, which, through good deeds, conquers and recognizes itself as good. If man neglects good, manly, and glorious works, “he remains wretched and most unhappy.” Education, as we see, in the author’s view, is identical with exercise. Man is such only insofar as he never rests and must constantly perfect and improve himself; insofar as he becomes a knower and master of the world, and through inquiry and investigation, learns and asserts himself as a personality and as a value. Now, this knowledge man does not acquire from books or solely from books, but it arises from exercise and from contact with men and things. We are what we do. The idea of education as the fruit of exercise is a felicitous intuition in the author and one rich in consequences for modern pedagogy.

Thus, virtue understood as our exercise, that is, as our conquest, implies the ever-vivid and active participation in knowledge, which is not merely an external adornment or vain display but rather our substance, our life, and our blood. Therefore, in his work *Del Principe Gelasto*, the author lampoons that type of scholar whose knowledge has not served to improve him in life, to enable him to understand life as action, as duty toward family and society. Hence, Charon rightly refuses to ferry Gelasto to the other shore because his knowledge has been in vain, as it did not teach him how to live well but remained entirely external and was not translated into rule and conduct of life. The author does not reject abstraction as inquiry; on the contrary, he recognizes it as proper.

With this end in view, that is, to affirm and promote the use of the vernacular, he became the promoter (1441), under the protection of the Medici, of the Certame Coronario, in which the author himself participated with the fourth book of *Della famiglia*, which deals, as we know, with friendship.

2. ART

Besides his pedagogical and moral works, the author, 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 in those of the sixteenth century by Serlio, Vignola, and Palladio. The author was the most typical product of mature Florentine humanism, a discerning and acute amateur who felt the inner need to investigate and experiment with everything solely for the purpose of understanding and enjoying intellectually rather than for the sake of production. And just as he was a musician and athlete, moralist and architect, painter and mathematician—thus reducing doing and knowing to a unity—so too he maintained that the painter must translate practical science and mathematics into practice, while at the same time postulating that the true architect should concern himself only with the design of his buildings, never descending to their practical execution. If all this—precisely the author’s chief merit—definitively freed the figurative arts from the status of “ars mechanica” to which medieval convictions had to some extent relegated them, as an artist the author nonetheless failed in 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 critics have had in defining his personality and hence also the label of “non-artist” applied to him by Schlosser, a rigid adherent of Croce’s schemas (v. CRITICA D’ARTE).

The author’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 façade, left unfinished, the author adapts the scheme of Roman triumphal arches to the requirements of the subject, creating the type of church façade with two superimposed orders and testifying to the contribution of knowledge of antiquity to Renaissance architecture. On the sides, the series of deep arcades containing sarcophagi, while recalling the tombs attached to medieval churches, is inspired by Roman aqueducts. According to the author’s design, the church was to have a hemispherical dome.

In completing the Gothic façade of S. Maria Novella in Florence, the author reused the scheme of the two superimposed orders and created the “scroll” between the upper part of the façade and the broader lower section. In Florence, the author carried out work in the church of S. Pancrazio, including the triforium of access, the free copy of *S. Scipio*, and others; in the church of the Annunziata, the “tribuna,” a circular-plan construction covered with a hemispherical dome and surrounded by chapels. The façade of the Palazzo Rucellai is attributed to him, characterized by the superimposition of orders on the rusticated facing.

In Mantua, on the design of the Author, were erected by