LEON
BATTISTA ALBERTI:
SOME
NEW FACETS OF THE POLYHEDRON
"Leon Battista Alberti" exhibition, curated by
Joseph Rykwert and Robert Tavernor. Held at the Palazzo Te, Mantua, Septem- ber
10 to December 11,
1994.
LEON BATT1STA ALBERT1, Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel,
editors, Olivetti/Electa (IvrealMilan),
1994,565
pp., illus.
Leon Battista Alberti's output was
immense, embracing poems, love stories and plays, political and moral treatises on civic humanism,
painting, sculpture, architecture, garden design, urban design, mathematics and
civil, mechanical, hydraulic, and construction engineering. And amazingly,
there are still parts of this uniquely polymorphous body of work that remain
enigmatic. It is so large that its exact limits have not yet been fully
surveyed, despite the quantity of books devoted to it. Many of Alberti's works
have disappeared, while others await definitive attribution. And at least one
work, a renowned text most certainly authored by him, has been attributed to
someone else for the last five hundred years.
The exhibition "Leon Battista Alberti," currently at the
Palazzo Te in Mantua, curated by Joseph Rykwert and Robert Tavernor, presents
all the Quattrocento Alberti manuscripts and incunabulae, encompassing his
incredibly vast, multifaceted oeuvre alongside computer-generated renderings
find models of his architectural projects, not one of which was completed in
his lifetime. The documentation accompanying the objects in the show is
exhaustive and impeccable, and in these terms alone, the catalogue is an
indispensable resource for anyone interested in Alberti. Its only shortcoming
is that it does not contain much information related to the computer
reconstructions of Alberti's buildings, which were carried out by the architecture
department of the University of Edinburgh under the direction of Tavernor. But
this only makes one look forward to a CD-ROM version of this work in the
future.
The catalogue contains more than just a description of the
exhibition. Rykwert and Anne Engel have assembled over twenty-five scholars to
contribute essays, many of them highly valuable for putting forth new
hypotheses about attribution or new evidence or arguments to support older
ones. The essays are clearly and engagingly written, and remarkably
well-integrated into a coherent whole. The editing of this volume is a
remarkable exercise in concinnitas.
The catalogue opens with a general overview of Alberti's life and
works by Cecil Grayson, who has been instrumental in breaking new ground in
Alberti scholarship. He stresses in particular the "two cultures"
aspect of the architect's work, the scientific and the humanistic-a point that
is taken up by Alberto Tenenti in the article that follows.
Alberti's role in the plan of Pienza, the new town founded by Pope
Pius II in the late 1460s, has long been a subject of controversy. There are
many Albertian traces in the city - Pius' palace is a near-replica of Alberti's
design for the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, and the layout is exemplary of Albertian
concinnitas, as Christine Smith has
shown in her Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism (see
review on page 27). The objects of Jan Pieper's study are the capitals of the
two semicolumns flanking the entrance to the Duomo of Pienza. He claims that
the one on the right, a winged mask of a man's face framed by leaves, contains
an emblematic representation of Alberti. Pieper maintains that the leaves,
which sprout from the forehead and chin, give the face the appearance of a
lion. He also argues that the face has the same proportions as other portraits
of Alberti, and that the location of the ears in relation to the wings resemble
Alberti's emblem of the winged eye. It is
true that Alberti, for some reason, did not tend to take credit for his works,
and in fact was strangely reticent about it. Still, the only persuasive
component of Pieper's otherwise tenuous argument is that the left column, which
has a representation of a crayfish, is emblematic of Bernardo Rossellino, whose
real name was Bernardo BambareIIi, deriving from gambero, meaning "crayfish." The argument that the two
columns are emblems, one representing the theoretician and the other
practitioner, takes on some plausibility. Readers may look forward to Pieper's
forthcoming book on Pienza for more solid clarification of Alberti's
much-disputed role in the design of that city.
How much of an artist was Alberti? Practically nothing remains of
the many works of art he produced, which he himself and others such as Giorgio
Vasari have described. This is not surprising as there is almost no trace of
any drawings by any artist of that time, but Alberti is known to have been a
portraitist. In his autobiography,
he describes his practice of painting and sculpting images of his friends. Was
he any good? Yes, if the only remaining work left in Alberti's hand - his own
self-portrait in bronze relief which he made in his youth - is any indication,
according to Luke Syson. In his
contribution, Syson also points out that this bronze relief was the first of
its kind, making Alberti an inventor in yet another field.
Never has there been a more exhaustive philological analysis of the
sources of Alberti's architectural theoretical categories than that put forth
by Hans-Karl Lucke in this volume. It has been established that Alberti's two
great sources were Vitruvius and Cicero, and that he was less inclined toward
the former than the latter. His most original theoretical \ concept, concinnitas,
is derived from a number of Cicero's texts. The strength of Lucke's essay
lies in its clear exposition of Alberti's deep belief that architecture was
akin to spoken language, to be used as a means of expressing human thought, as
a form of speech, not just grammar. No other Renaissance architect thought in
these terms.
Alberti never illustrated his architectural
treatise, De re aedificatoria, something for which Francesco di Giorgio
(who did illustrate his) criticized him. Now Gabriele Morolli has done it for
him, at least with regard to his chapter on temples. The result is a stupendous
feat of scholarship. The reason why Alberti did not illustrate the treatise
himself, Morolli argues, is that he was interested in forming a new language,
as Lucke explains so well. If Alberti did not illustrate his manuscript, it
would not have been for lack of drafting talent, but simply because of his
humanist's faith in the word. At a time prior to the invention of the printing
press, when ideas were diffused essentially through manuscripts, the text
became the most meaningful. This posed problems of its own, as Giovanni Orlandi
points out in his contribution. The manuscript of De re aedificatoria was
five-hundred pages. It took twenty manuscript writers three weeks to produce
one copy of it for the Duke of Ferrara. In spite of Alberti's own efforts to
correct the manuscripts-obvious from his own addenda to the pages-errors
abounded. Yet, as Morolli points out, it is with words that Alberti chose to
forge a new language of architectural composition. This is also why his book
was eventually superseded by illustrated works, such as those by Giacomo
Barozzi da Vignola, Andrea Palladio, and Sebastiano Serlio. But its form is
only part of the reason; indeed, as Morolli observes, Alberti's treatise
presents a much more complicated set of compositional directives than that put
forth by Vignola. The buildings that could be created with his rule system are
extraordinarily vast, far more so than anything that could be derived from the
more popular and conservative architectural rule books that followed.
Alberti was not only actively involved with the
corrections of his manuscripts, but he was assiduous on the building site as
well, battling to have his designs implemented, as Arturo Calzona demonstrates
in his sagalike narration of the events surrounding the construction of the
Church of San Sebastiano in Mantua. His essay is based on recently discovered
archival material, which is published in an appendix to the article. Yet, for
all of Alberti's efforts, the Church of San Sebastiano, like his manuscripts,
was impossible to control, which explains the building's bizarre facade,
obviously lacking in concinnitas, whose logic scholars have been
speculating about for the past hundred years.
Did Alberti playa role in the urban projects for
Rome of the humanist Pope Nicholas V? Since 1880, when the Austrian scholar
Georg Dehio published a list of attributions-including the aqueduct of the Aqua
Vergine, the erection of the Fountain of Trevi, the works on the Campidoglio,
the restoration of San
Stefano
Rotondo, and the Castel Sant' Angelo, the restructuring of Saint Peter's
Basilica and of the Vatican palaces, the urban project for the Borgo region of
the city, and various works on fortification and roads - the answer has been
yes. This was broadly accepted by scholars involved with the subject, including
Ludwig Pastor, Piero Tomei, Charles Singer, Carroll William Westfall, Franco
Borsi, Christoph Thoenes, C. R. Mack, and Cecil Grayson - until Manfredo Tafuri
stated in an article published in the Harvard
Architectural Review in 1987 that Alberti's involvement was almost nil. As
a civic humanist, Tafuri argued, Alberti could never have been party to
Nicholas' schemes because the Pope was in fact not a humanist but a
Machiavellian despot whose political program was authoritarian, coercive, and
pre-absolutist. In his contribution, Charles Burroughs responds to Tafuri's
challenge in an extremely cogent and balanced manner. In his view, Tafuri's
interpretation leaves out the more indeterminate character of the political
context, which was necessarily fluid and complex. He suggests that the only way
to correctly weigh Alberti's part in Nicholas V's plans is to analyse them
individually rather than in a sweeping manner, and to do so employing a broad,
multidisciplinary approach. He examines four projects to illustrate his point.
First, he invokes the urban renovation scheme for the Canale di Ponte, the area
across the Tiber from the Castel Sant' Angelo next to the entrance to the
bridge. He argues that Alberti could have been directly involved in it because
of his close ties with the Florentine banker Tommaso Spinelli, the depositarius of the Church who, as an
intermediary between the papacy and the local republican citizenry, played an
extremely important role in the development of the project. Moreover, he sees a
direct application of Alberti's theory of perspective in the marvelous and
illusionistic dimension of the design of the new piazza. Second, Burroughs
brings up the design for the Vatican Basilica, which was never realized. By
reconstructing the micropolitical context of the papal court and the highly
charged local politics, he argues convincingly that Alberti could have been
Initially commissioned to supply a design, but that the project subsequently
met with opposition from either the building site or in-fighting within the
papal court. What did the design look like? No one knows for certain. But
Burroughs, considering the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, suggests most
plausibly that the design wound up on this later building. Why would Alberti
reuse the design here? Because it was at the other end of the Via Flaminia from
the Vatican, which had been restored for the Jubilee of 1450, and it would have
been part of no initial plan to have two Christianized triumphal symbols at
either end, fitting in most felicitously with the political ambitions not only
of Nicholas, but of his conditiere, Sigismondo
Malatesta.
Burroughs cites as his third example the restoration of the Fountain
of Trevi, arguing that Alberti would have carried it out for Prospero Colonna,
and not for the Pope. This stands to reason. Alberti's real ties in Rome were
to the Colonnas, as Burroughs rightly points out. Little wonder. An uncle of
Prospero's, Oddone, Pope Martin V, used his influence with the Florentine
Signoria to revoke the ban against the Albertis, which had been in effect since
the beginning of the century. As a result, Leon Battista entered the beloved
city of his forebears for the first time in his life. He owed much to the
Colonnas and he was a member of their family circle. For many reasons he may
even have identified with them; as a civic humanist, he shared their republican
sympathies. The Fountain of Trevi was within the Colonna district, and its
restoration would have enhanced the family's political prestige, more so than
the Pope's.
Burroughs' fourth and last example is the Tridentine scheme for the
Borgo, with its three aligned, commercial, porticoed streets converging on a
large square centred by an obelisk, facing the Vatican. Why does Burroughs
attribute this project to Alberti? Because it is modelled on Bologna, where
Alberti studied law. Burroughs sees the project as a reconciliation of papal
and republican interests. Out of this analysis, Nicholas V emerges as a civic:
humanist, bent on establishing a new modus
vivendi for traditionally opposing factions-that of his own court and that
of the city of Rome - and Alberti appears as a trusted and ingenious consultant
at large.
Joseph Rykwert's contribution takes us from Ferrara, where the Arco
del Cavallo and the Campanile, traditionally attributed to Alberti, are
located. According to the author, however, Alberti is not responsible for them.
In both cases the arch rests on a cylindrical column, and no one knows better
than Rykwert that this is absolutely unacceptable, as propounded in Book XII of
the De re aedificatoria. In addition, the capital of the column
supporting the arch of the Arco del Cavallo is completely out of proportion
according to Alberti's own canon, giving the entire structure a bizarre,
clunky, ungainly appearance, as if the capital were hydrocephalic. But who
designed it then? After all, in the Arco del Cavallo, the column's proportions
are faithful to Vitruvius' formula. Who else would have known this but Alberti?
Rykwert's answer is that, while it is impossible to exclude the possibility of
Alberti's participation, he was unable to achieve the results of the Tempio
Malatestiano, conceived at the same time, but elaborated much later, because he
had not yet reached maturity.
It is known that Alberti built monumental works for the new
"princes" of Mantua, the Gonzagas. But in a letter, Alberti also
describes a "loggia" that he designed in the city. This would mean
that he was also engaged in shaping the more common, mercantile urban fabric of
the city. The loggia has never been identified with any certainty. Birolamo
Mancini, Alberti's first scholarly biographer who in 1911 defined the limits of
Alberti's oeuvre in a work that remains a standard-bearer today, believed it
was the loggia superimposed on the Porta Pustela which was destroyed in 1903.
Kurt Forster, on the other hand, argues that it is the Loggia dei Mercanti. He
cites as evidence the two inordinately refined, composite pilasters holding up
the arch at the intersection of the Loggia dei Mercanti and a small side
street, which are clearly based on the ones in Brunelleschi's design for the
Basilica of San Lorenzo, where the transept intersects with the nave. This is a
most compelling argument. Who else would have been as familiar with
Brunelleschi's design as Alberti? Who else was more inspired by him? Who else
would have desacralized an ecclesiastical element and used it in a civic
context?
Mantua is again the topic of discussion in Paolo Carpeggiani's essay,
which considers Ludovico Gonzaga's plans for a renovatio urbis. He discovers the location of Alberti's Church of
Sant'Andrea in a new alignment in the city, starting from the new Gonzaga
Palace and extending right through the city, through the Church of Sant'Andrea.
Ludovico used this symbolic and visual axis, the asse gonzaghesco, to connect himself with the mercantile and
commercial tissue of the city, as a means of symbolically representing the Jew
order.
Vision is, of course, also the topic of Hubert Damish's insightful
essay on the relation between architectural composition according to concinnitas, and the composition of a
painting according to the rules of perspective. He concludes with a citation of
Serlio: without architecture there would be no perspective. Then he turns it
around: without perspective there could not have been architecture.
Christine Smith is one of the scholars
contributed the most to
changing our view of Alberti by exploring his architectural views posited in
his nonarchitectural writings. It has been traditionally assumed, based on a
partial reading of De re aedificatoria, that he disliked ornament and
preferred the geometrical proportion based on Plato's Timaeus. Smith
overturns this view by looking at his early writings, such as Della
tranquillita dell'animo and the fourth book of his Della famiglia, entitled De amicitia (On friendship), in which
he enthusiastically describes the ornamented Temple of Diana in the Ephesus.
This she sees as influencing his design of the facade of Santa Maria Novella in
Florence, San Sebastiano in Mantua, at the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini.
For all of Alberti's great love of ornament, he
was no less passionate about number, geometry, alignment, and proportion. This
is clear from his belief, underlined in Lucke's contribution, that the numerus
animus was the essential nucleus of life. This notion is also corroborated
in George Hersey's essay, which centers on Alberti's proportions for the
Etruscan Temple, as well as Paul von Naredi - Rainer's piece on his
numerological aesthetics. Livio Volpi Ghirardini's astounding analysis of Sant'
Andrea, employing the rigorous iconometric techniques associated with classical
archaeology, reveals the proportional systems at work in the church and permits
the dating of its various interventions. Maria Karvouni's essay demonstrates
the complexity of Alberti's mathemat- ics, based not on whole numbers but
irrational numbers (such as V2a, B3a, and V4a)-a surprising approach even for
someone who was a close friend of Paolo Toscanelli, the greatest mathematician
of his day. Another aspect of Alberti's proportional system is uncovered by
Tavernor. Apparently Alberti abandoned the antique model of the navel as the
center of the outstretched human body inscribed inside a circle or a square
(which Leonardo da Vinci used, for example). The effect on the overall system
of proportion, based on his own concept of concinnitas, was that it
deviated from the antique Vitruvian prototype of perfection and was more
oriented toward the body as found in nature.
Alberti's relation with the painter Andrea
Mantegna is well known. Both were proteges of Ludovico Gonzaga of Mantua.
Mantegna settled in Mantua, a city Alberti visited often. Mantegna was the most
learned of all the Renaissance painters, as his depictions of architecture and
mastery of Albertian perspective amply demonstrate. It has always been assumed
that the architectural elements that play such a great role in his paintings
(in particular, the frescoes in the Ovetari Chtpel and the Camera degli Sposi)
were the result of close consultation with Alberti. Keith Christiansen's
contribution focuses on the illusionary oculus painted on the ceiling of
Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi, where painted space is totally integrated with
built space - a strong Albertian inspiration.
While the Tuscan or Etruscan references in
Alberti's buildings in Florence and Mantua are well known, his regionalist
inclinations also extended to
other
areas of his creative production. Armando Petrucci's brief study offers an
insightful and surprising glimpse into a previously uncovered facet of
Alberti's inventiveness: his handwriting. As Petrucci points out, it is neither
completely classical nor totally Tuscan, but it does constitute an attempt to
form a new synthesis, like his architecture.
Strangely, not much has been written about Alberti as an engineer,
aside from Joan Gadol's classic, unique, and unfortunately much-overlooked
study Leon Battista Alberti: Universal
Man of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
Alberti, like all humanists, is commonly seen as simply a designer interested
in architectural forms and aesthetic theory. In fact, it must be said that De
re aedificatoria is at least as much,
if not more, a technical manual than a theoretical treatise. It is concerned
with materials, construction, foundations, soil, hydraulics, building
management, mechanics, construction techniques for vaults, plastering, roofing,
pavements, stairs, city walls, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure,
including roads, artificial river banks, canals, locks, and bridges. Alberti
was particularly concerned with sewers and drains in general. One of the two
key passages in the book on his theory of concinnitas
is located, almost as a second thought, in the middle of a chapter dealing
with pins, wheels, pulleys, levers, different types of mortar and stucco, and
the preparation of lime.
Gustina Scaglia, a leading specialist on Jacopo Mariano Taccola
(known as II Taccola) and his student Francesco di Giorgio, discusses in her
contribution the many technological facts contained in Alberti's De re aedificatoria and Ludi matematici (Mathematical games).
She points out, for example, that the architectural treatise contains fifty
references to engineering. Her list includes: the reparations of the walls of
Saint Peter's, a tunnel through the hill at Pozzuoli, the foundations of the
Temple of Latona in Rome, ventilation shafts in the Church of San Marco in
Venice, and the discovery of a type of humid clay in Palestrina.
From Scaglia's study, Alberti the engineer emerges as a pale shadow
of the picture Gadol painted: and certainly not the person whose engineering
thinking so impressed Leonardo da Vinci - in particular Alberti's surveying
techniques and his treatise De navis (Now
lost), a technical book on ships. Scaglia presents him as a mere commentator of
first- century Greek scientists Hero of Alexandria and Pappus. Two of Hero's
inventions in particular might have influenced Alberti, she observes: a device
for measuring distances traveled on land, called an odometer, and another for
distances traveled on water, although they are also described by Vitruvius who
lived a century before Hero. She establishes that the five elementary machines
- the capstan, lever, pulley, wedge, and screw - described in De re are in fact paraphrases of Hero's Mechanica.
The two inventions Scaglia does allow him are the surveying device
he employed in his map of Rome – which has been dealt with exhaustively by
Gadol (who is not footnoted) – and something Alberti called the fontane a termini, an airpressure siphon
in which air and water rise and fall alternately. Alberti comes out
short-changed in this essay, which fails to give due credit to one of the most
active mechanical, civil, hydraulic, and construction engineers of the
Renaissance.
The last essay in the catalog, by Pietro Marani, reflects, very
appropriately, on the relationship between Alberti and Leonardo. Leonardo's
possession of Alberti's De navis is
undisputed as he mentions it in his notebooks. Scholars have shown that he also
knew of Alberti's De pictura, Ludi
matematici, and one version of De re
aedificatoria. Carlo Pedretti has established that San Sebastiano and San
Andrea directly influenced Leonardo's architectural designs. Eugenio Garin has
shown the influence of Alberti's Intercoenales
(a collection of dialogues, apologias, and short stories), in particular, Lapides, on one of Leonardo's
"ideal" designs. Marani curiously leaves out the influence of
Alberti's map-making techniques on Leonardo's maps of central Italian towns, an
observation that does appear in Franco Borsi's Leon Battista Alberti (Milan: Electa, 1975). Nevertheless, Marani's
conclusion - that, without Alberti, there would have been no Leonardo - rings
true, casting light on the crucial importance of the transmission of knowledge
to humanistic and scientific discovery.
As Marani puts it, Alberti had a polyhedral mind. He cut a distinct
figure, standing out among other Quattrocento humanists whose work was
similarly multifaceted - ll Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio, Brunelleschi,
Bonaccorso Ghiberti, Donato Bramante, Mantegna, Paolo Uccello, and even
Leonardo. Only one work comes close to reflecting the polyphilic character of
Alberti's oeuvre, and that is the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili, a text that has been attributed to Francesco Colonna for the
past five-hundred years.
An examination of Alberti's poems, plays, and novels, however,
reveals reasons to believe that, in fact, he was the author of this
hyper-erudite, hyper-passionate, hyper-inventive book. Traces of its title
appear in his other writings, Philodoxeos,
Ecantofilia, and Amator (Latin
for philo), and, like the Hypnerotomachia, almost all of the
heroes in these works have names that are Greek in derivation. The fantastic,
extravagant, Lucian "serious/facetious" aspect of the Hypnerotomachia, to quote Cecil Grayson,
is also prefigured in earlier works by Alberti, such as Momus, Mosca, Canis, and parts of Intercoenales.
But the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili is not just a literary work, as is well known. It is an
architectural treatise. In this respect there is further evidence of Alberti's
authorship. To begin with, the book contains over eighty verbatim and
quasi-verbatim quotations of Alberti's De
re aedificatoria. Even more remarkably, it is the only other book of the
Renaissance to employ Alberti's highly idiosyncratic terminology, including the
term concinnitas. If it is true that
the author is Alberti, it would explain the overwhelming number of obsessive
descriptions of proportion, number, and geometry in the book.
What is less well known is that the Hypnerotomachia contains ingenious machine devices, including a
gigantic light bulb that projects moving images and automatic doors whose intricate
workings are minutely described, and some fontane
a termini, taken almost literally from De
re aedificatoria and Ludi matematici.
The book's protagonist is effusive in his admiration for structural
ingenuity and construction techniques. He is particularly interested in drains
as well as hemispheric dome structures (like the one Alberti had in mind for
the Annunziata in Florence, as opposed to Brunelleschi's dome at Santa Maria
del Fiore, which bears the trace of a pointed Gothic form). The book also echoes
Alberti's theory of perspective as put forth in his De pictura in particular, with regards to the role of quadratura (gridding) in framing a
picture. De pictura resonates in
another passage of the Hypnerotomachia which
deals with how color perception changes with distance. The passage even
contains reference to the concentric topographic technique Alberti developed in
his map of Rome in the map of Cithera.
If Alberti was the author of the Hypnerotomachia,
it would explain the presence of the trireme in the book. Alberti wrote De navis after lifting a trireme out of
Lake Nemi. Alberti's authorship would also explain the bucking steed so
admiringly described and illustrated in the novel because no one loved
horses more
than he did. He prided himself on his excellent horsemanship in his
autobiography, and is famous for giving the visiting Rucellai contingent a
rigorous riding tour of Roman ruins when he was well into his sixties. He also
devoted a treatise to horses called De equo animante. Finally, in De re
aedificatoria,he used the body of a horse as a model for beautiful
architecture.
Another element of the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili that att,ests to Alberti's authorship is the presence of the eye
on a winged treasure represented among the hieroglyphs, Alberti's love of
inscriptions, which covered his own buildings, is expressed in the more than
eighty Greek and Latin epigrams in De re, In addition, Alberti's
education at the school of Barzizza in Bologna would explain the polyglotic
protaganist, who uses a mixture of Latin, Greek, and vernacular Tuscan, while
his friendship with Hebrew specialist Manetti and Arabologist Nicolas of Cusa
(colleagues of bis at the papal curia) would explain the smattering of
Hebrew and Arabic in the work, And, on an autobiographical note, Alberti's
authorship would explain the strangely ecclesiastical garb worn by the hero of
the story.
If Alberti indeed wrote the book, it would explain
the high level of visual culture in its illustrations. No one know more about
contemporary painting than the author of De pictura. His ability as a
draftsman was looked down upon by Vasari, but it is known that Vasari was
jealous of Alberti. His drafting skill was in fact lauded by Angelo Poliziano,
among others, who, as a close observer of Florentine contemporaries such as
Sandro Botticelli, was no mean judge of artistic qualities.
Finally, if Alberti was the author of the Hypnerotomachia,
ironically, it would even explain why the book was never attributed to him.
Alberti was totally uninterested in self-promotion, to the extent that his own
autobiography was anonymous, and he signed his first literary work under
someone else's name, He never even took any credit for the architectural
designs he executed, which has made attributions so problematic. The one
instance when he signed one of his works, the Church of San Martino a
Gangalandi near Florence (he renovated the apse), it was only in an indirect
way: he signed as vir populi,man of the people, Furthermore, Alberti was
notoriously negligent when it came to keeping track of his manuscripts once he
had finished writing them. His brother Bernardo, writing to a friend about one
particular manuscript, describes how Alberti had given it away as a present to
an enthusiastic bystander:
You have
asked me many times in the past for these works, de profigiis aerumnarum, which
were lost to us, and which out of respect I shall not specify how, but you well
know the nature of my brother, Master Battista, it is impossible for him to
deny anyone what they ask of him: I will not say more. A certain domestic of
his asked for these books as soon as they were completed. Thirty years have
passed since then, And he had the first original.l
Alberti was probably simply too busy creating to keep track of his
creations. This is no doubt why only the third book of his Della famiglia was known up until the 20th century and was
attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini, the book's main speaker. (Alberti is one of
three characters, but he is virtually silent all the way through. Pandolfini is
his spokesman.) This is also no doubt why the last chapter of even his most
famous book, the De re aedificatoria, though
mentioned in the book's index, is absent from the final publication.
Why would Alberti have written Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili? If the date 1467 is correct, it was written almost twenty years
after De re aedificatoria, a period
of not merely architectural theory but intense practice. In addition, at that
time, he would have just been relieved of his duties at the papal court, and
would have had more free time than usual on his hands. It is plausible that he
conceived of this novel as a summary of his literary, artistic, architectural,
technical opus. This would make the Hypnerotomachia
the legacy of a humanist deeply enamored of his life's work and of the very
principle of creativity itself, cast in the most passionate terms he could
imagine. The book is not just a literary work, or an architectural treatise, or
for that matter, a treatise on engineering, mathematics, geometry, painting, or
perspective. It may also be seen as a reflection of the workings of Alberti's
own mind, an analysis of the cognitive processes involved in his own
creativity, of which he seems to have been very aware and which he seems to
have applied to all areas of his activity, and which he brings together in a
synthetic way for the first time in this book: architecture, in engineering
literature and the arts.
The problem of the authorship and meaning of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is an intriguing and rich subject, and
reveals yet another enigmatic side of Alberti's highly creative ingegno.2 What current
Alberti studies reveal, as demonstrated in the catalogue and the exhibition by
Rykwert, Tavernor, and Engel, is that the investigations concerning Alberti's opus
are far from being exhausted. .
NOTES
1. Opere volgari di Leon Battista Alberti, annotate e illustrate da A.
Bonucci, vol. 1 (Florence, 1843-49), p. 185.
2.
This is the focus of L. Lefaivre's Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).