Leon Battista Alberti: Teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del "De re aedificatoria.
Smith, Christine
Arturo Calzona, Francesco Paolo Fiore, and Cesare Vasoli, eds. Leon
Battista Alberti: Teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del "De
re aedificatoria. "
2 vols. Centro Studi L B. Alberti lngenium 9. Florence; Leo S.
Olschki, 2007. xvi + 1028 pp. + 162 b/w pls. index, illus. tbls.
[euro]98. ISBN: 978-88-222-5605-8.
Scholarly interest in Leon Battista Albert) has, in the past two
decades, been prodigious: the foundation of the Centro di Studi sul
Classicismo in 1992, with its project to publish critical editions of
all Alberti's works; and after the international congress in Paris
in 1995 of the Societe International Leon Battista Alberti (SILBA),
which plans the publication of all his works and publishes the annual
Albertiana, and was followed in 1998 by the establishment of the
Fondazione Centro Studi Leon Battista Alberti in Mantua. The output of
congresses and publications organized and sponsored by these three
centers over the past ten years is substantial, yet a complete view of
Alberti studies today would also need to include the exceptionally large
number of books and articles on him produced independently in the same
period. Continuously updated bibliographies of this extraordinary
outpouring arc available on the web through Michel Paoli's site
(http://alberti.wordpress.com/bibliografia.com) and a link on
SILBA's site (http://www.silba.msh-paris.fr/). The Mantuan center,
looking forward to the sixth centennial of Alberti's birth (18
February 1404), organized no less than eight congresses and three
exhibitions that took place between 2002 and 2006: the fruit of two of
the eight congresses, almost 1,000 pages of scholarly work, make up the
volumes reviewed here.
These two congresses were conceived by Alberto Tenenti in
collaboration with Arturo Calzone, Francesco Paolo Fiore, and Cesare
Vasoli and developed with other distinguished members of a scholarly
committee. Tenenti died in 2002; the remaining three organizers brought
the work to publication and dedicated it to his memory. The first of the
congresses, titled "Gli impegni civili del De re
aedificatoria" took place in Mantua in 2002. It sought a
comprehensive approach to Alberti's treatise, considering it not
only as a work on architecture but also as a vision of the
buildings' destinations, and of the society that would produce,
receive, and value them. Thus papers both on the forms and techniques of
buildings and on their functions and social purposes were solicited. The
second congress, on Alberti as theorist of the arts, took place the
following year. It proposed to examine the relations between painting,
sculpture, and architecture in Alberti's works; explore textual,
iconographic, and built evidence relevant to the principles of the arts;
and, more generally, to shed light on Alberti's modes of thought
and intellectual procedures. The programs for both congresses are given
in the front matter of volume 1. In preparing the papers for
publication, however, it was decided that given the essential unity of
the material and the opportunity to present divergent views in a single
work, it would be better not to retain this original order of
presentation. More than a record of the congresses' proceedings,
the publication is a compendium of essays on and around their themes.
Does any new image of Alberti emerge from the enormous amount of
scholarly attention he has received, or are previous interpretations
being confirmed and completed with new evidence? The forty-seven
contributions in these volumes are a microcosm of where the topic is
today.
The quality of the essays is uniformly excellent. This may itself
reflect the intensity of Alberti studies: a great many fine scholars
are, today, deeply engaged in research on Albertian topics and this, in
turn, sets the bar rather high for those who wish to join the discourse.
Indeed, not a few of the contributions display remarkable erudition. To
give just one example, Stefano Borsi's study of Alberti's
sources brings to bear an extraordinary knowledge of classical,
biblical, and medieval literature on various Aibertian writings. Like
his, most of the essays are intertextual; confirming, correcting, and
amplifying interpretations of words and their associated ideas in
various of Alberti's works. Given the diverse genres and subjects
of Alberti's writings, such scholarship is of necessity
interdisciplinary. This breadth of enquiry, ranging over multiple
Aibertian texts and manifold source materials, favors restricting the
specific topic to be investigated. So, there is a tendency to build a
whole essay around a single word (Betts on lineamenta), often revisiting
key Albertian terms (Morresi and Bulgarelli on concinnitas) or, at most,
a short passage (Bulgarelli, Lucke, Gros, Furno). But such studies do
not only produce erudite philological explanations. Rather, the kind of
poetic, evocative, and thought-provoking writing that characterized
Albertian scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century
reappears in several papers. Borsi, for instance, writes suggestively
about Alberti's creative process: from the enormous quantity of
disparate kinds of source materials converging in his mind Alberti, from
his modern experience, recomposes the disjecta membra of antiquity.
Rinaldi, too, writing about Alberti's sense of order and disorder in an elegant prose that is perhaps more deeply intuitive than
scientifically argued, illuminates the character of his mind.
The high quality of the essays is of different kinds. Some essays
are excellent in that they offer magisterial overviews of classic
Albertian problems: so, for instance, Gabor Hajnoczi's on Vitruvian
elements in the treatise on painting; Christoph Frommel's on the
column in Alberti's theory and practice; Gabriele Moroili's on
the morphology and etiology of the round and quadrangular column; and
Alberto Tenenti's on society and De re aedificatoria. Others
continue to plumb the influence of language theory on Alberti's
ideas about the arts, but with new subtlety (Carpo, Cieri Via,
Biermann). Other essays impress for the skill and sophistication with
which they connect Alberti to new contexts. Among these, 1 note
especially Sebastiano Gentile's exploration of Alberti,
Regiomontanus, and the reception of Ptolemy's Geography in
Bessarion's circle in Rome in the 1460s: it clarifies and revises
our understanding of Quattrocento perspective and cartography in the
context of the history of ideas. Manuela Morresi's "Biblical
Sources in De re aedificatoria" interprets Alberti's five
psalm compositions (psalmi preca-tionum) in the context of new
translations of the Bible and the resulting controversies, not only lays
out in exemplary fashion the ways in which the Bible is used in De re
aedificatoria, but .suggests that concinnitas the ruling virtue of
architecture, is not essentially different from the agape of 1 Cor.
13:1-8, 13. Yet other essays propose substantially new understandings of
fundamental Albertian ideas. I mention Massimo Bulgarelli's subtle
and nuanced discussion of beauty-ornament in terms of representation,
nature, and artifice, in which he suggests that Alberti abjured
metaphysical notions of beauty as perfection, believing that ornament,
which renders beauty visible, is linked to illusion, artifice, and
technique. Also focusing on optical values, Mario Curti shows that,
unlike Vitruvius, Alberti found visual perception primary not only to
the reception, but even to the conception of buildings. This leads Curti
into an exploration of Alberti's difficulty, shared with Aristotle,
in theorizing poiesis--how something can be conceived for which there is
no model.
Curti and Borsi both take up the question of Alberti's
creative process, exploring it on the basis of different kinds of
evidence. Taking their conclusions as complements, we could say that
while Alberti does not attempt to create ex nihilo he nonetheless makes
new things. And this insistence on Alberti as an essentially original
thinker is the most commonly-shared and striking new feature of the
Albertian scholarship in these volumes. Some papers address the theme
directly (Collareta, C. Frommel). Many more, even while tracing out his
use of sources (especially classical ones) with a greater precision than
ever before, emphasize Alberti's engagement with modernity, perhaps
even as superior to ancient authority (Marsh, Passarelli, Batschmann,
Poeschke, Bruschi, Betts, McLaughlin, Burroughs, Biermann, Rinaldi,
Lucke, Calabi, Morolli, Fiore, Furno). This new Alberti is pragmatic,
even relevant, concerned with what is useful here and now and therefore
essentially with direct experience and with novelty. Diminished, on the
other hand, is the degree of Alberti's dependence on Vitruvius
(Zampa, Gros, Wulfram). A corollary is the tendency to characterize
Alberti's achievement less in terms of the revival of the classical
past than as the beginning of an entirely new development for Western
European architecture which ended only with the advent of Modernism in
the twentieth century (Payne, C. Frommel, S. Frommel, Fiore, Di
Teodoro). This new Alberti not only looks forward rather than back, but
down rather than up: no longer concerned with eternal truths, he eschews
Utopias. Not surprisingly, several papers posit Aristotle rather than
Plato as fundamental for Alberti's intellectual culture and
(perhaps as a consequence?) others explore his use of Scholastic--and
therefore recent, medieval--sources (Di Stefano, Zanoncelli, Bouvrande,
Poeschke, Borsi, Curti). And, Finally, a subjective, relativist, and
therefore entirely modern Alberti is seen as concerned with pleasure,
the senses, and the emotions, and hence with perception, illusion, and
imagination (Di Stefano, Batschmann, Wolf, Woodhouse, Bulgarelli, Lucke,
Curti, Gunther, Fiore). The congress organizers state that their intent
was to elicit an up-to-date discussion of Alberti's literary and
artistic production using the most fruitful methods of analysis. The
contents of these two volumes admirably fulfill those aims.
Christine Smith
Harvard University, Graduate School of Design