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  • 标题:Leon Battista Alberti: Teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del "De re aedificatoria.
  • 作者:Smith, Christine
  • 期刊名称:Renaissance Quarterly
  • 印刷版ISSN:0034-4338
  • 电子版ISSN:1935-0236
  • 出版年度:2008
  • 期号:December
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:The Renaissance Society of America
  • 摘要: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.
  • 关键词:Books

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
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