Contribution to philosophy, science, and the arts of Leon Battista Alberti

The treatise “Della famiglia” (“On the Family”), which he began in Rome in 1432, is the first of several dialogues on moral philosophy upon which his reputation as an ethical thinker and literary stylist largely rests. He wrote these dialogues in the vernacular, expressly for a broad urban public that would not be skilled in Latin: for the non litteratissimi cittadini, as he called them. Based upon classical models, chiefly Cicero and Seneca, these works brought to the day-to-day concerns of a bourgeois society the reasonable counsel of the ancients—on the fickleness of fortune, on meeting adversity and prosperity, on husbandry, on friendship and family, on education and obligation to the common good. They are didactic and derivative, yet fresh with the tone and life-style of the Quattrocento (the 1400s). In Alberti’s dialogues the ethical ideals of the ancient world are made to foster a distinctively modern outlook: a morality founded upon the idea of work. Virtue has become a matter of action, not of right thinking. It arises not out of serene detachment but out of striving, labouring, producing.

This ethic of achievement, which corresponds to the social reality of his youth, found ready acceptance in the urban society of central and northern Italy in which Alberti moved after 1434. Travelling with the papal court of Eugenius IV to Florence (the ban of exile against his family was lifted with the restoration of Medici influence), Bologna, and Ferrara, Alberti made several congenial and fruitful contacts. The writings, both the Latin and vernacular ones, that he dedicated to his new associates are imbued with his characteristic notions of work, practice, and productive activity; and he took upon himself in turn the technical and practical problems that were absorbing his friends and patrons. In Florence his close associations with the sculptor Donatello and the architect Brunelleschi led to one of his major achievements: the systematization of the painter’s perspective. The book On Painting, which he wrote in 1435, set forth for the first time the rules for drawing a picture of a three-dimensional scene upon the two-dimensional plane of a panel or wall. It had an immediate and profound effect upon Italian painting and relief work, giving rise to the correct, ample, geometrically ordered space of the perspectival Renaissance style. Later perspectival theorists, such as the painter Piero della Francesca and Leonardo, elaborated upon Alberti’s work, but his principles remain as basic to the projective science of perspective as Euclid’s do to plane geometry.

His friendship with the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli was of comparable practical and scientific importance. It was Toscanelli who provided Columbus with the map that guided him on his first voyage. Alberti seems to have collaborated with him in astronomy rather than geography, but the two sciences were closely bound at the time (and bound to perspective) by the conceptions and methods of geometric mapping rediscovered in the writings of the ancient astronomer and geographer Ptolemy. Alberti’s distinctive contribution to this current of thought took the form of a small treatise on geography, the first work of its kind since antiquity. It sets forth the rules for surveying and mapping a land area, in this case the city of Rome, and it was probably as influential as his earlier treatise on painting. Although it is difficult to trace the historical connections, the methods of surveying and mapping and the instruments described by Alberti are precisely those that were responsible for the new scientific accuracy of the depictions of towns and land areas that date from the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

At the Este court in Ferrara, where Alberti was first made a welcome guest in 1438, the Marchese Leonello encouraged (and commissioned) him to direct his talents toward another field of endeavour: architecture. Alberti’s earliest effort at reviving classical forms of building still stands in Ferrara, a miniature triumphal arch that supports an equestrian statue of Leonello’s father. Leonello inspired a great humanistic undertaking as well as a mode of artistic practice on Alberti’s part by urging him to restore the classic text of Vitruvius, architect and architectural theorist of the age of the Roman emperor Augustus. With customary thoroughness, Alberti embarked upon a study of the architectural and engineering practices of antiquity that he continued when he returned to Rome in 1443 with the papal court. By the time Nicholas V became pope in 1447, Alberti was knowledgeable enough to become the Pope’s architectural adviser. The collaboration between Alberti and Nicholas V gave rise to the first grandiose building projects of Renaissance Rome, initiating among other works the reconstruction of St. Peter’s and the Vatican Palace. As the Este prince was now dead, it was to Nicholas V that Alberti dedicated in 1452 the monumental theoretical result of his long study of Vitruvius. This was his De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture), not a restored text of Vitruvius but a wholly new work, that won him his reputation as the “Florentine Vitruvius.” It became a bible of Renaissance architecture, for it incorporated and made advances upon the engineering knowledge of antiquity, and it grounded the stylistic principles of classical art in a fully developed aesthetic theory of proportionality and harmony.

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During the final 20 years of his life, Alberti carried out his architectural ideas in several outstanding buildings. The facades of Sta. Maria Novella and the Palazzo Rucellai, both executed in Florence for the merchant Giovanni Rucellai, are noted for their proportionality, their perfect sense of measure. They are worthy successors to the art of Brunelleschi, initiator of the Florentine Quattrocento style of architecture. Other buildings look forward to the 16th century, particularly to Donato Bramante, the architect of St. Peter’s. The classical severity of Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano, commissioned by Sigismondo Malatesta, the ruler of Rimini, and the new sense of volume and amplitude of the majestic Church of San Andrea, which he designed for Ludovico Gonzaga, the humanist Marquess of Mantua, announce the fullness of the High Renaissance style. Alberti was not only the foremost theorist of Renaissance architecture: he had become one of its great practitioners as well.

Architecture preoccupied him during the 1450s and 1460s, and he traveled a great deal to the various cities and courts of Renaissance Italy, but Rome and Florence remained his intellectual homes, and he continued to cultivate the interests they had always stimulated. In Rome, where republican life was precluded by the papal government, he was absorbed by technical and scientific matters. His response to certain problems entertained by members of the Papal Chancery led to two highly original works in this category. One is a grammar book, the first Italian grammar, by which he sought to demonstrate that the Tuscan vernacular was as “regular” a language as Latin and hence worthy of literary use. The other is a pioneer work in cryptography: it contains the first known frequency table and the first polyalphabetic system of coding by means of what seems to be Alberti’s invention, the cipher wheel. Although he had been dismissed from the Papal Chancery in 1464 because of the retrenchment ordered by Pope Paul II, Alberti undertook this study, of obvious importance to the papacy, at the request of a friend who stayed on as a papal secretary.

In all his projects, Alberti employed his intellectual gifts in some “useful” work—useful to the artistic, cultivated, and courtly circles in which he moved, including painters and builders, mapmakers and astronomers, humanists, princes, and popes. In all of his work, his versatility remained bound to the social outlook that characterized the “civic Humanism” of Florence.

It is fitting that his final and finest dialogue should be set in Florence and be written in the clear Tuscan prose he had helped to regularize and refine. Although the republicanism of Florence was now eclipsed, and Alberti now moved as a familiar in the circle of the princely Lorenzo de’ Medici, De iciarchia (“On the Man of Excellence and Ruler of His Family”) represents in full flower the public-spirited Humanism of the earlier bourgeois age to which he belonged. Alberti is its chief protagonist, and no more appropriate figure is conceivable. For this dialogue, more than any other, celebrates the union of theory and practice that Florentine Humanism had attained and the ethic of achievement and public service that he himself had come to exemplify. De iciarchia was completed just a few years before his death. He died “content and tranquil,” according to the 16th-century biography by Giorgio Vasari.

Legacy

Alberti was in the vanguard of the cultural life of early Renaissance Italy. He has been admired for his many-sided nature, as has Leonardo da Vinci, who followed him by half a century and resembles him in this respect. Yet in Alberti’s case, unity as much as versatility typifies the man and his accomplishments. Leonardo’s genius carried him further than Alberti: he saw more and saw more deeply. But Leonardo’s vision has a “modern,” fragmentary character, whereas Alberti attained a completeness in thought and life that fulfilled the Renaissance ideals of measure and harmony. His intellectual and artistic pursuits were all of a piece, and he struck a unique balance between theory and practice, realizing this dominant aspiration of his age at the very moment social and political events had begun to cause it to fade.