Rinaldo Rinaldi. "Melancholia Christiana." Studi sulle fonti di Leon Battista Alberti.

Frank, Maria Esposito

Rinaldo Rinaldi. "Melancholia Christiana." Studi sulle fonti di Leon Battista Alberti. Firenze: Olschki, 2002.

Rinaldi's volume is, as announced in the title, a study of Alberti's sources, which are many, and of disparate kinds. The study takes into consideration a significant number of Alberti's works, especially the Intercoenales, the Apologi, Momus, De iciarchia, and various texts on love (Deifira, Ecatonfilea, Sofrona, De amore). Digging in Alberti's mine of citations, references, correspondences, allusions, emulations, and re-creations, Rinaldi traces the peculiar creative process of Leon Battista, one of enigmatic complexity. A complexity that--as Rinaldi aptly shows--has to do with Alberti's distinctive ways of reworking ancient texts into his own, often with pervading melancholia, and also a profound sense of religious devotion that Rinaldi appropriately explores on the literary plane (not the ideological one). Among Rinaldi's merits is not only the one of adding more names and titles to the list of classical sources used by Alberti, but especially his masterful presentation of the combinatory quality of the work through which Alberti dismembers his sources, accumulating fragments and quotations, both hidden and explicit, and creates as a result a net of texts woven into a new one where the old or pre-existing parts are no longer directly identifiable or separable, but only audible as if through multiplying echoes. Thus we are invited to enter the intricate semantic layers and hidden polemics produced by Alberti's ever-proliferating variations on ancient texts.

Over and throughout that sum of "un-reassembleable" materials (which do not simply amount to montage, puzzle, collage, mosaic, as scholars to date have seen it) Rinaldi finds the dark shadow of a radical skepticism, almost a Qoheletian vanitas vanitatum, about the value of human knowledge. Indeed, Rinaldi argues, it is the very composite character of Alberti's texts (first and foremost the Intercoenales and Momus) that challenges any full interpretations or deciphering, and seems instead to point to the limits of human knowledge through a mystical-religious component (silence and faith) made of internalization.

Rinaldi's book is well organized, with an opening chapter where the scholar himself lays out his contentions and the issues before tackling them more specifically in the following seven chapters, each of which provides new insights into Alberti's various works. Particularly interesting is chapter two, which focuses on Alberti's writings on love (which I indicated above); here Rinaldi discusses, among other things, previous interpretations that reduced these texts to a kind of moralistic-didactic literature. Rinaldi shows them to be, instead, expressions of a sort of negativity and darkness connected with the phenomenology and pathology of love, as presented in well-known ancient and medieval philosophical and medical traditions. Equally noteworthy is Rinaldi's discussion of Alberti's experimentalism with genres and his predilection for the satirical, particularly in the Apologi, the 100 fables that, in a convincing argument that includes fascinating references to the Hegelian systematization, Rinaldi presents as participating in the satirical genre. And the parodic quality/nature of the Intercoenales is also part of this chapter that so painstakingly examines styles, genres, and the language of these works in order to help us see, in the brachylogy of Alberti's Apologi, an expression of saturnine brevitas and micrology: a withdrawal of the author and of art itself, leaving therefore an empty, silent space that presents the artistic/creative efforts as illusory. We see other melancholy traits as well--discontinuity, anxiety of negation, fracture and uneasiness towards traditional morals and forms--that have no equal in the Renaissance period and after (until our own times, in Gadda's fables). In chapter four, the dark note pervades also the parallelisms Rinaldi finds among the hagiographic text Vita S. Potiti, Momus, and certain Intercoenales such as Discordia (the themes of justice being absent from the human world, and of fortune as ruling earthly destinies). And the main point of chapter five is the shift "dal rifiuto melancolico al rifiuto parodico" (from Theogenius to Momus), when the gloominess typical of Alberti's views turns derisory, and the sublime, lofty topics are treated in a ferociously caricaturing style and a burlesque mode. Momus is also the subject of the sixth and seventh chapters: in the former, titled "'Momus Christianus': altre fonti albertiane," Rinaldi discusses Alberti's usage of biblical and Patristic materials, namely how these sources are often superimposed over a classical, more obvious source, thereby affecting the meaning and effect of the text (this procedure is also to be found in the Apologi and some Intercoenales). In the latter chapter titled "Momo come Giuda?," we read of the images, portrayals, and allegorical depictions of Judas (as found in Dante, Boccaccio, S. Bernardino) that are all echoed in Alberti's Momus. But Rinaldi's investigations and observations do not merely point at the variety of Patristic, medieval and Renaissance textual places and ways in which the biblical Judas seems so convincingly to re-live in Alberti's creation, Momus: his is not just a study of sources and echoes, because these fifteenth-century pages are also seen as proleptic to much later works, namely to nineteenth-century literary stories--such as Anatole France's Lejardin d'Epicure and, later yet, Borges' Three Versions of Judas. The last chapter deals with the Dialogues that Alberti composed last (especially the De iciarchia). The chapter is valuable not so much for its references to Florentine politics and its reflections in Alberti's texts (references that have been well explored before); nor for its discussion of ante litteram Machiavellian attitudes (already observed by others), but for its fascinating discussion of the theme of silence, as a symptom of melancholy, and as a defense from evil. Rinaldo Rinaldi's Melancholia Christiana sheds new light on Alberti's hypertextuality and pluridiscoursiveness. It is a book for specialists, with frequent and lengthy quotations in Latin. It is a rich, welcome addition to the scholarship on Alberti and on the Renaissance in general.

MARIA ESPOSITO FRANK

University of Hartford