Studies on Alberti and Petrarch 9781409441984, 2012934931, 9781351219426

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VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES

Studies on Alberti and Petrarch

David Marsh (Photo by Diana Marsh)

David Marsh

Studies on Alberti and Petrarch

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition © 2012 by David Marsh David Marsh has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Marsh, David, 1950 Sept. 25Studies on Alberti and Petrarch. - (Variorum collcctcd studics scrics ; CSlOI2) 1. Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374 - Criticism and interpretation. 3. Humanism - Italy. 4. Humanism in litcraturc. I. Title II. Series 858.2'09-dc23

ISBN 9781409441984 (hbk) Library of Congress Control Number: 2012934931

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CSlO12

CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgements

ix Xli

1. INTRODUCTORY I

Alberti, Leon Battista

1-9

Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. P.F. Grendler, 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999, 1,27-32

II

Leon Battista Alberti at the millennium (review essay)

1028-1037

Renaissance Quarterly 55, 2002

III

The self-expressed: Leon Battista Alberti's autobiography

125-140

Albertiana 10, 2007

2. PETRARCH IV

Petrarch and Alberti

363-375

Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, eds A. Morrogh, F. Superbi GiofJredi, P. Morselli, and E. Borsook, 2 vols. Florence: Giunti-Barbera, 1985, I

V

Petrarch and Jerome

1-19

Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 49, 2004, 85-98

VI

Petrarch and Suetonius: the imperial ideal in the republic of letters

525-535

Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bonnensis: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress ofNeo-Latin Studies, Bonn 3-9 August 2003, ed. R. Schnur (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 315). Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006

VII

Poetics and polemics in Petrarch's invectives Humanistica 1, 2006

41--46

CONTENTS

vi

VIII

The burning question: crisis and cosmology in the Secret (Secretum) 211-217, 421--426 Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, eds V. Kirkham and A. Maggi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009

3. ALBERTIAN ALLEGORY IX

AND SYMBOLISM

Alberti's Momus: sources and contexts

619-632

Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Hafniensis: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress ofNeo-Latin Studies, Copenhagen 12-17 August 1991, ed. R. Schnur (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 120). Binghamton, NY: State University ofNew York, 1994

X

Alberti and Apuleius: comic violence and vehemence in the Intercenales and Momus

405--426

Leon Battista Alberti: Actes du Congres International de Paris, 10-15 April 1995. Paris: J. Vrin and Torino: Nino Aragno, 2000

XI

Alberti, Scala, and Ficino: Aesop in Quattrocento Florence

105-118

Albertiana 3, 2000

XII

Visualizing virtue: Alberti and the early Renaissance emblem

7-26

Albertiana 6, 2003

XIII

Alberti and symbolic thinking: prolegomena to the dialogue Anuli

13-31

Leon Battista Alberti: teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del "De re aedificatoria, " Atti dei Convegni internazionali del Comitato Nazionale VI centenario della nascita di Leon Battista Alberti, Mantova, October 2002-0ctober 2003, eds A. Calzona, F.P. Fiore, A. Tenenti, and C. Vasoli. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007

XIV

L' Alberti, il Pisanello e gli Este: Devises e medaglie umanistiche nel primo Quattrocento Leon Battista Alberti: Actes du congres international Gli Este e I 'Alberti: Tempo e misura, Ferrara, 29 November-3 December 2004,2 vols. Pisa-Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2010, 2

101-110

CONTENTS

4.

POGGIO, ALBERTI, AND VAT. LAT.

XV

vii

4037

De curialium incommodis: Alberti and Poggio

37-43

Humanistica 2, 2007

XVI

Poggio and Alberti: three notes

189-215

Rinascimento 23, 1983

XVII Girolamo Massaini trascrittore dell'Alberti (with Paolo d'Alessandro)

260-266

Albertiana 11-12,2008-2009

5.

TEXTUAL PROBLEMS IN ALBERTI

XVIII Further notes on Leon Battista Alberti's Dinner Pieces

23-37

Allegorica 14, 1993

XIX

Textual problems in the Intercenales

125-135

Albertiana 2, 1999

1-8

Index This volume contains xii + 286 pages I

PUBLISHER'S NOTE The articles in this volume, as in all others in the Variorum Collected Studies Series, have not been given a new, continuous pagination. In order to avoid confusion, and to facilitate their use where these same studies have been referred to elsewhere, the original pagination has been maintained wherever possible. Articles I and V have necessarily been reset with a new pagination, and with the original page numbers given in square brackets within the text. Each article has been given a Roman number in order of appearance, as listed in the Contents. This number is repeated on each page and is quoted in the index entries.

PREFACE Two outstanding individuals played a central role in the cultural movement that we call the Italian Renaissance: Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (13041374) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). By virtue of their essential contributions, they each lay claim to a primacy in the history of Western learning and letters. Petrarch is often called the "father of humanism," and Alberti the "first universal man of the Renaissance" (I, IV). Hence, without an adequate knowledge of their exemplary lives and works, and their influence on posterity, any concept of the Renaissance must be considered incomplete. The present anthology aims at offering the reader a spectrum of interrelated studies about these two cultural giants. My research on Alberti and Petrarch began with a doctoral dissertation, "The Quattrocento dialogue: classical tradition and humanist innovation," defended at Harvard University in 1978 and published with revisions by Harvard University Press in 1980. This work was inspired by my reading of Cicero's dialogues, which vividly portray diverse philosophical discussions in a specific historical setting. Within this tradition, Petrarch's Secretum initiated the Renaissance revival of classical dialogue; and Alberti's Della Famiglia was the first composition to use the vernacular in discussing classical ethics. Indeed, the social fabric of humanistic learning marks a significant break with the Scholastic learning of the later Middle Ages. The abstract logic and a priori deductions of theologically oriented tracts are now replaced by exchange, in letters and dialogues, of empirical ideas about history and human values. The pairing of these two humanists is neither arbitrary nor fortuitous, for their careers offer emblematic parallels across the Trecento and Quattrocento, the formative centuries of the Italian Renaissance. Alberti was born in 1404, a hundred years after Petrarch; and like his humanist precursor, he studied law at the University of Bologna. In 1341, Petrarch was crowned as Latin poet laureate on the Capitoline hill in Rome; and one century later, Alberti organized a vernacular poetic contest, held in the Florence cathedral in 1441, that likewise offered a crown to the winner. Naturally, there were differences between the two scholars: Alberti learned classical Greek, which had eluded Petrarch. Whereas Petrarch was content to collect ancient coins, Alberti became a central theorist and practitioner of the visual arts, especially painting and architecture (XII, XIII, XIV). Indeed, one of the great challenges posed by

x

PREFACE

research on Alberti is the intersection of verbal texts and visual symbols that are a part of his innovative approach to the Western tradition. Both read widely in classical Latin and applied their knowledge to new forms of moral reflection - Petrarch in earnest treatises and epistles, and Alberti in witty allegories and dialogues. By virtue of their learning and eloquence, both men were welcomed into the service of church prelates and of northern Italian princes. They also furnished their contemporaries and posterity with verbal portraits of their lives and ideals - Petrarch in his letters and Secretum (VIII), and Alberti in an autobiography, recounted in the third person in accordance with the classical example ofXenophon and Caesar (III). Both men admired the eloquence of Cicero, but also drew eclectically on other authors and authorities (V, VI, X). Petrarch was a devotee of Augustine, and couched his epistles in the moralizing tradition of the younger Seneca. Alberti, in tum, lampooned ecclesiastical affairs by using classical mythology in his Momus (IX, X), and by inventing symbolic icons that point moral lessons in his Dinner Pieces (XVIII, XIX). Whereas Petrarch reaffirms the traditional wisdom of classical and patristic authors (V, VI), Alberti seeks a more ancient and more universal perennial philosophy, a timeless wisdom that can be encoded and encapsulated in apologues and images (XII, XIII, XIV). Employed by both Petrarch and Alberti, the dialogue form dramatizes the exchange of opinions that characterizes humanist debate; and the essays that follow examine these humanists as they "dialogue" both with ancient writers and with their own contemporaries. Often we find them engaged with fellow humanists, whether in friendly rivalry or in heated controversies. And since both men took minor orders, and served prelates in various capacities, they have a good deal to say about the Church, and seldom in laudatory terms Petrarch decries Avignon and its arrogant cardinals (VII), and Alberti lampoons the avarice and ambitions of the papacy and the Curia (XV). Despite his versatility as a writer and an artist, Alberti faced considerable obstacles in his career. To begin with, he was an illegitimate child, and needed a special dispensation in order to join the papal Curia. He composed his Italian dialogue On the Family as a tribute to the powerful banking clan of the Albertis, but his relatives could not be troubled to read it. All the same, other humanists seem to have valued his work, including two fellow Tuscans in the next generation: Bartolomeo Scala and Girolamo Massaini (XI, XVII). But the paucity of both manuscripts and incunabula containing Alberti's works, and the often defective texts that they offer, suggest that many of them remained unknown and unstudied even during his lifetime (XVIII, XIX). The present volume seeks to redress this neglect, as well as to establish Alberti as a singularly original heir to the legacy ofPetrarchan humanism. To be sure, the past twenty years have witnessed an explosion of journals and critical

PREFACE

xi

editions dedicated to the study of Alberti (II). Yet by virtue of their astounding variety, his works are often studied and even stored in isolation from each other. (Alberti scholars will often find that many of his humanistic works have been deposited in art history libraries, and therefore do not circulate.) By contrast, the literary and philological study of Petrarch's Latin works has flourished for more than a century and shows no sign of abating; even though we still lack critical editions of important works like the De remediis. I hope that the essays that follow will in some measure contribute to our understanding of the Italian Renaissance. DAVID MARSH Rutgers University February 2012

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following persons, journals and publishers for their kind permission to reproduce the articles included in this volume: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York (for article I); the University of Chicago Press (II, VIII); Francesco Furlan, editor of Albertiana and Humanistica (III, VII, X, XI, XII, XV, XVII, XIX); Giunti-Barbera, Florence (IV); the American Academy in Rome (V); the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe (VI, IX); Leo S. Olschki, Florence (XIII); Fabrizio Serra Editore, Pisa and Rome (XIV); Fabrizio Meroi, editor of Rinascimento, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (XVI); and Sara van den Berg, editor of Allegorica (XVIII). Thanks also to Paolo d' Alessandro, co-author of XVII, for permission to use the article. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. There are many people whom I would like to thank for their advice and friendship over the years. Besides offering scholarly guidance, the late Myron Gilmore and Paul Oskar Kristeller helped find funding for research in Italy. During my first years in Florence, I was fortunate to meet fine scholars with whom I have stayed in touch: Concetta Bianca, Silvano Cavazza, Keith Christiansen, Samuel Cohn, Riccardo Fubini, Gary Ianziti, Vicky Kirkham, Anthony Molho, Marzia Pieri, David Quint, and Guido Vannini. Later, at the American Academy in Rome I was introduced to learned colleagues like John McManamon, Derek Moore, and Glenn Most; and over the years I have benefited from the counsel and conviviality of Michael lB. Allen, Stefano Ugo Baldassarri, Brian Copenhaver, Charles Fantazzi, Francesco Furlan, Anthony Grafton, James Hankins, Robert Kaster, James Masschaele, Martin McLaughlin, John Monfasani, Michel Paoli, Amedeo Quondam, David Rundle, and Carlo Vecce. Naturally, I am indebted to many libraries, which I cite here with gratitude: Alexander Library, Rutgers University; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence; Firestone Library, Princeton University; Library of Congress, Washington; Newberry Library, Chicago; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City; Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; and above all the Vatican Library.

I Alberti, Leon Battista *

[27] Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), humanist and architect, was born in Genoa, the illegitimate son of Lorenzo Alberti, a Florentine banker whose family had been exiled from Florence as a result of the Ciompi revolt of 1378. He was named Battista Alberti, after the patron saint of Florence,John the Baptist, and only assumed the name Leo as an adult. Between 1415 and 1418, Alberti studied in Padua with Gasparino Barzizza; and then went to Bologna to study civil and canon law. When his father died in 1421, Battista was cheated of his inheritance by unscrupulous cousins. Evidently preferring literary endeavors to legal studies, the twenty-year-old Alberti composed a Latin comedy titled Philodoxeos (The Lover of Glory), which he circulated as an ancient work written by Lepidus. It may have been in Bologna that Alberti began to compose and collect what he called Intercenales or Dinner Pieces, brief Latin dialogues and apologues illustrating moral themes. In Bologna, Alberti met Tommaso Parentucelli, the future pope Nicholas V, and Francesco Filelfo, with whom he may have studied Greek. Alberti's Intercenales draw inspiration from the works of the Greek satirist Lucian. Yet by contrast to humanists like Filelfo, Alberti never translated ancient works from Greek, but merely used them as models for his own original compositions. In 1428, Alberti completed his law degree and, taking orders, sought employment in the papal Curia. While in Bologna, Alberti composed at least two Italian works on the subject of love, to which he gave Greek names in the manner of Boccaccio: the treatise Ecatonfilea and the dialogue Deiftra. These two works enjoyed enormous success both in the original and in translation, and were in fact the only works of Alberti printed in his lifetime (padua, 1471). In 1431, Alberti became secretary to Biagio Molin, patriarch of Grado and a papal chancellor. When Molin asked his protege to write a Latin biography of the obscure Saint Potitus, Alberti found the task uncongenial. As he later wrote in a letter to his colleague Leonardo Dati, he was forced to base his Vita S. Potiti (Life of St. Potitus) on such flimsy historical evidence that even the saint's existence appears doubtful. *This essay originally appeared in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul r. Grendler, 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999, 1: 27-32. The original page numbers appear in square brackets within the text.

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In 1428, the exile of the Alberti family from Florence was revoked; and in 1432 Battista visited his ancestral city, where he was named prior of the rural parish of San Martino a Gangalandi. Meeting with a cool reception by older Florentine humanists, Alberti composed the Latin essay De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (On the Utility and Futility of Literary Studies), in which he decries the low social status which attends the pursuit of learning. (On the basis of Alberti's autobiography, the work was traditionally dated to 1428, but Luca Boschetto has recently proposed the later date.) If his Latin work met with little praise in Florence, Alberti was prepared to challenge the Tuscan humanists on their [28] own linguistic ground. Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini had recently revived the Latin philosophical dialogue following the model of Cicero. Inspired by their example, Alberti composed an Italian dialogue in three books to which he gave the Latin title De familia (On the FamilY). (Like many Renaissance authors, Alberti usually gave Latin titles to his vernacular writings.) Couched as a ragionamento domestico, the dialogue features distinguished men of the Alberti clan who discuss the principles of householding, including such topics as education, marriage, and estate management. To these three books, Alberti in 1437 added a fourth book in which the topic of friendship is discussed. (Curiously, the complete work enjoyed less popularity than a rewriting of his third book which circulated, and was even printed as the Governo della Famiglia ascribed to Agnolo Pandolfini.) Despite the Florentine origins of his family, Alberti was raised in the north of Italy, and found it difficult to write in idiomatic Tuscan prose. Following the linguistic suggestions of Tuscan friends, Alberti revised his Books on the FamilY, creating a versatile Italian prose that ranges from colloquial banter to formal disquisition. He became the century's most prominent champion of the vernacular, and later composed the first grammar of the Italian language, the Grammatica della lingua toscana (Grammar of the Tuscan Language). As in other fields, Alberti was also an innovator as an Italian poet. He wrote the first eclogue in Italian Tirsi (Tryrsis), and experimented with classical meters like unrhymed hexameters. In 1441, precisely a hundred years after Petrarch had been crowned in Rome for his Latin poetry, Alberti organized an Italian poetic competition in Florence which he called the Certame Coronario ("Contest for the Crown"). When the judges declined to award the prize, Alberti circulated an anonymous letter of protest in Italian, and recorded the event in his Latin dinner pieces Garlands and Emy. Such setbacks also inspired two Italian dialogues to which Alberti gave Latin titles: Theogenius and Profugiorum ab erumna libri (Remedies for Misfortune). In both works, a sage elder comforts a younger man, who

I Alberti, Leon Battista

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is overwhelmed by recent rejections and tribulations. Many of these writings reflect the disappointment which, by contrast to this reception among artistic circles, Alberti felt in the company of older and more prominent Tuscan humanists like Leonardo Bruni, Niccolo Niccoli, and Poggio Bracciolini. In this context, we may understand the note of defiance in his personal motto. While he adopted the winged eye as his personal emblem symbolizing the swiftness of his intellectual gifts, he chose as a motto the Latin phrase Quid tum? ("So what?") which, as Guglielmo Gorni was the first to see, is a citation from Virgil's Eclogues 10.37 ("Quid tum, si fuscus Amyntas?") that makes light of Alberti's illegitimacy. In Florence, Alberti seems to have found the artistic environment particularly congenial and stimulating. In 1435, he composed a Latin treatise De pictura (On Paintinj) , which he soon translated into Italian with a dedication to Filippo Brunelleschi, hoping to make the work available to artists without a knowledge of Latin. In its three books, Alberti sets forth the principles of optics and linear perspective, discusses the narrative subject (ist01ia), and advocates the value of humanist learning in the visual arts. From 1436 to 1438, Alberti was in Bologna with the Curia, and the return to the city of his student days inspired a number of short compositions in Latin. He wrote a treatise De jure (On Law), a dialogue on episcopal duties titled Pontifex (The Bishop), and a hundred Aesopic fables, Apologi, which (as he proudly recorded in the manuscript) he composed during the week of December 16-24, 1437. The most influential composition of this period was his autobiography of 1437, a Vita which he modeled after the recently translated Lives of the Philosophers of Diogenes Laertius. Written in the third person, like memoris of Xenophon and Caesar, this "anonymous" life was to inspire Burckhardt's notion of the universal man of the Renaissance - an ideal by which the illegitimate Alberti legitimated his cultural identity. In 1437, Alberti also wrote two Italian works on love, the treatise De amore dedicated to Paolo Codagnello, and the brief dialogue 5 ofrona. When the Council of Florence-Ferrara convened in 1438, the Este rulers of Ferrara gave Alberti his first artistic commission, a classical arch to support an equestrian statue of Niccolo III d'Este. The Estes of Ferrara thus became the first of the northern Italian rulers to foster Alberti's artistic and literary projects. To Leonello d'Este, Alberti dedicated first his Italian dialogue Theogenius and later his Latin treatise on the horse, De equo ammante. To Leonello's brother Meliaduso d'Este, he dedicated his Ludi rerum mathematicarum (Mathematical Recreations) (1450-52), an Italian handbook of twenty exercises in surveying and applied geometry. After Alberti's death,

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some of his Dinner Pieces circulated in Ferrara, where they were copied by Pandolfo Collenuccio [29] (1444-1504) and imitated by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1532). During the summer of 1438, when a plague forced the curia to leave Ferrara, Alberti used his leisure to write new works: Villa, a brief set of Italian precepts on agriculture, based on Hesiod and Cato the Elder, and Uxoria (Taking a Wije) a Latin fable which he later translated into Italian. From 1439 to 1443, Alberti was back in Florence. Around 1440, Alberti wrote three Latin works in a lighter vein on the topic of animals: Canis (My Doli), a eulogy of his deceased pet; Musca (The FlY), a rewriting of Lucian's Encomium of the FlY, which he had read in Guarino of Verona's translation; and the treatise on the horse, De equo animante, mentioned above. In 1443, the Curia returned to Rome, where Alberti produced his Descriptio urbis Romae (Survry of the City of Rome), a map of the city viewed from the Capitoline hill and charted on polar coordinates. Alberti applied a similar method in a Latin treatise on statuary, probably dating from the same period, in which he describes how a given statue can be copied using a series of measurements taken from a central vertical axis. During the pontificate of Nicholas V, a friend from his days in Bologna, Alberti participated in a number of projects involving restoration and city planning. Around 1450, Alberti published his most ambitious literary work in Latin, Momus sive De principe (Momus or On the Ruler), a prose novel in four books. Borrowing from Lucian's satirical dialogues of the gods, Alberti narrates how a feckless Jupiter wavers in his resolve to destroy the world and create a new one. Scenes set in heaven and on earth satirize the foolish ambitions and political machinations of both gods and men. In 1452, Alberti completed his De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building), ten books in Latin on the theory and practice of architecture. Although the Roman treatise by Vitruvius served as a model, Alberti's books are largely original in their weighing of historical evidence and in their synthesis of building styles and their social context. Addressing every aspect of the subject - topics such as symmetry, proportion, ornamentation, restoration, and even urban planning - Alberti's books prove more comprehensive than the later architectural treatises of the High Renaissance. During the same period, Alberti wrote Latin and Italian versions of a treatise called Fundamentals of Painting (Elementa picturae, Elementi di pittura), and dedicated the Latin version to the Byzantine scholar Theodore Gaza, recently arrived in Rome from Ferrara. In 1453, after Stefano Porcari led an abortive plot against pope Nicholas V, Alberti wrote a brief account of the event in a Latin epistle which is his only historical work.

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[30] After 1450, Alberti increasingly devoted his spare time to architectural projects. In Rome, he was apparendy consulted in the restoration of Santo Stefano Rotondo, a circular fifth-century church. His first large-scale commission came from Sigismondo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, for whom Alberti attempted to convert the church of San Francesco into what became known as the Tempio Malatestiano, or Malatesta Temple. To the existing structure, Alberti applied an outer "shell" resting on a classical pediment: a facade patterned after the nearby Roman triumphal arch in Rimini, and exterior walls incorporating arched recesses. In this project as in later ones, Alberti supervised the work from a distance, writing to Matteo de' Pasti in Mantua to express his wishes. In the 1460s and 1470s, the Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai chose Alberti as the architect for a number of commissions. In the Rucellai palace and loggia, Alberti's successfully adapted classical elements to Florentine secular building. In his parish church of San Pancrazio, Rucellai had his own tomb built in the form of the Holy Sepulcher, which is the only architectural project that Alberti seems to have supervised personally. Rucellai also financed the completion of the facade of Santa Maria Novella, which had been begun in the Gothic style. Alberti's design effects a smooth transition from the Gothic angularity of the lower facade to the serener geometric patterns of the upper portion. With great insight, Alberti also solved the problem of reconciling the towering central nave with the lower side aisles. His solution - the so-called "aedicula facade" with sloping volutes that join the two elevations - soon entered the common vocabulary of church architecture and remained in wide use even in the Baroque. The Gonzaga rulers of Mantua were important promoters of Alberti's artistic endeavors. Around 1438, Alberti sent the Latin version of his treatise De pictura to Giovan Francesco II Gonzaga with a letter of dedication. In 1460, Alberti was in Mantua with pope Pius II, who was attempting to organize a crusade against the Turks. In the next twelve years, Alberti received three important commissions from Marquis Ludovico Gonzaga: in Florence, the choir of Santissima Annunziata; and in Mantua, the churches of San Sebastiano and Sant'Andrea. In their extant form, none of these works make clear Alberti's intentions. It is not even certain that Alberti designed the choir of Santissima Annunziata. But Vasari ascribes the work to Alberti, only to criticize the awkwardness of its design as proof of Alberti's bookish inexperience. San Sebastiano, begun in the 1460s, represents an early example of the Renaissance fascination with centrally planned churches. In it, a larger square is set as a diamond over a smaller square half its size. Unfortunately, the

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church underwent later modifications, including a muddled restoration carried out in the 1920s. Sant' Andrea, which many consider Alberti's masterpiece, was begun in the 1470s and much of the structure was completed only after his death. Alberti achieved the church's massive proportions by basing the elevations of nave and chapels on Roman barrel vaults that imitate those of the baths of Caracalla or the basilica of Maxentius. The monumental vaults of Sant'Andrea provided inspiration for Roman churches like St. Peter's and the Gesu. In his later years, Alberti wrote only a few works. Around 1460, he compiled a brief Latin manual of rhetoric titled Trivia senatoria, which he dedicated to the young Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492). In 1462, he wrote a brief set of Sentenze pitagoriche (Pythagorean maxims), written in Italian and dedicated to his nephews. [31] In 1464, when pope Paul II abolished the office of apostolic abbreviator (who reviewed the Latin in documents), Alberti found himself with time for new projects, both literary and architectural. In 1465, he composed a Latin treatise on cryptology De componendis cyfris (How to devise codes), dedicated to Leonardo Dati, his colleague in the Curia who may have been in charge of encoding papal correspondence. As David Kahn writes, ''Alberti's three remarkable firsts - the earliest Western exposition of cryptanalysis, the invention of polyalphabetic substitution, and the invention of enciphered code - make him the Father of Western Cryptology" (The Codebreakers, p. 130). In his preface, Alberti mentions the recent invention of movable type, and one is tempted to speculate what he might have achieved if he had lived long enough to exploit the new technology. In 1470, he completed his last work, De lciarchia (The Householder), a didactic Italian dialogue in which he himself appears as the elderly Battista instructing young Florentines in the social responsibilities of the ideal householder. He died in Rome on 25 April 1472, but the location of his mortal remains is unknown. In the generation after his death, Alberti's accomplishments were largely eclipsed, although Politian praised his learning and eloquence in a Medicean edition of the books on architecture published in 1485. In part, this temporary oblivion was the result of Alberti's own ambiguous and elusive role as an author and architect. Alberti often places himself at a distance from his literary works, frequently using pseudonyms or describing himself in the third person. Such detachment is mirrored in the long-distance supervision of his architectural projects. (His Florentine patron Giovanni Rucellai never mentions Alberti in the zibaldone, or diary, that records his personal and civic projects.) Even today, many of his written works, both in Latin and Italian, remain the disiecta membra of a prolific genius who died without a literary

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executor. Most of his works survive as single compositions or "occasional" experiments - even improvisations, as he boasts in Musca or in his dating of the Apologi. Alberti did not cultivate popular humanist genres such as historical tracts or epiistolary collections, and his more ambitious compositions were often left incomplete. The ten books on architecture contain many lacunae which he apparently intended to fill in later. By 1499, the editor Girolamo Massaini lamented that he could find no complete collection of Alberti's Dinner Pieces. Given their scope and variety, Alberti's writings could only be rediscovered in a fragmentary fashion. The first works to be printed ranged from the Italian treatises on love to the Latin books on architecture. Massaini's 1499 edition pointed the way toward anthologies of various genres. In the sixteenth century, two editions of Momuswere printed in Rome in 1520, and by mid-century the work was translated into Spanish. A highpoint in the Tuscan revival of Alberti is marked by the years 1550 and 1568: in those years, Giorgio Vasari published the first and second editions of his Lives of the Artists, and Cosimo Bartoli printed his Italian translations of On Architecture, Momus, and other works. The versatility described in Alberti's autobiography inspired Burckhardt's notion of the "universal man of the Renaissance." But this individualistic notion of culture was less influential than Alberti's syncretic vision of learning and its applications. More than any of his contemporaries, Alberti succeeded in fusing ancient and modern elements in the double perspective of humanist endeavor. On the one hand, his systematic treatises on Italian grammmar, painting, statuary, and architecture offered a theoretical basis for a new literary and artistic culture. On the other, he demonstrated the practical utility of cross-fertilization by translating his Latin works into Italian and by designing innovative monuments which incorporate classical models and motifs. Yet Alberti's classicism is eclectic rather than dogmatic. The private structure of the Rucellai palace adapts an elevation based on the public amphitheater, and his Christian churches feature both decorative motifs borrowed from Roman triumphal arches, and structural units like the barrel vault used in Roman baths.

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Bibliography Note. Since 1998, the Societe Internationale Leon Battista Alberti has published Albertiana, a yearly journal of studies related to Alberti.

Primary Sources Alberti, Leon Battista. Opere volgari [Works in Italian]. Ed. Cecil Grayson. 3 vols. Bari, 1960-73. Alberti. L'architettura (De re aedijicatoria) [On the Art of Building]. Ed. and trans. Giovanni Orlandi and Paolo Portoghesi. 2 vols. Milan, 1966. Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts if "De pictura" and "De statua". Ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson. London, 1972. Alberti, Leon Battista. Dinner Pieces: A Translation if the "Intercenales". Trans. David Marsh. Binghamton, 1987. Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art f!f Building in Ten Books. Trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge MA, 1988.

Secondary Works Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century ItalY: A Primer in the Soria! History if Pictorial S ryle. Oxford, 1972. Useful for Alberti's theory of painting. Borsi, Franco. Leon Battista Alberti: The Complete Works. New York, 1977. The best survey of Alberti's art and architecture. Burroughs, Charles. From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in EarlY Renaissance Rome. Cambridge MA, 1990. Important for Alberti's Roman projects under Nicholas V. Davies, Paul, and David Hemsoll. "Leon Battista Alberti." The Dictionary if Art. 34 vols. London, 1996. 1:555-569. Fine survey with ample bibliography. Gadol,Joan. Leon BattistaAlberti: UniversalMan if the EarlY Renaissance. Chicago, 1969. Useful survey of Alberti's life and achievements. Grafton, Anthony. Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder if the Italian Renaissance. New York, 2000. Grayson, Cecil. Studi su Leon Battista Alberti. Florence, 1998. Important essays and textual studies in English and Italian by the pre-eminent editor of Alberti's works. Kahn, David. The Codebreakers: The Story if Secret Writing. N ew York, 196 7. Includes a discussion of Alberti's importance as cryptologist. Krautheimer, Richard. Studies in EarlY Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art.

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New York, 1969. Contains two essays on Alberti's architecture (''Alberti and Vitruvius," ''Alberti's Templum Etruscum"). Mancini, Girolamo. Vita di Leon Battista Alberti. 2nd ed. Florence, 1911. Reprint Rome, 1971. The standard biography. Marsh, David. The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation. Cambridge MA, 1980. Includes a chapter on Alberti's On the Family. Rykwert, Joseph, and Anne Engel, eds. Leon Battista Alberti. Milan, 1994. Exhibition catalogue with important essays in Italian. Smith, Christine. Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence, 1400-1470. New York, 1992. A recent analysis of Alberti and humanist notions of esthetics. Tavernor, Robert. On Alberti and the Art of Building. New Haven, Conn., 1998. A richly illustrated survey of Alberti's architecture in the context of his humanism. Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. 3rd ed. New York, 1962. Includes two groundbreaking chapters on Alberti.

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Leon Battista Alberti at the Millennium Leon Battista Alberti: Congres International, Paris, 10-15 avril 1995. Actes edites par Francesco Furlan. 2 vols. Paris: J. Vrin; Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2000. 1123 pp. + 108 plates. $95. ISBN: 2-7116-4499-2. Leon Battista Alberti. Descriptio urbis Romae. Edition critique, traduction et commentaire par Martine Furno et Mario Carpo. Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance, vol. 56. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2000. 196 pp. n.p. ISBN: 2-600-00396-7. Luca Boschetto. Leon Battista Alberti e Firenze: biografia, storia, letteratura. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000. xv + 334 pp. Lire 70,000. ISBN: 88222-4898-8. Anthony Grafton. Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. xi + 417 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-8090-9752-4. Ingomar Lorch. Die Kirchenfossade in Italien von 1450 bis 1527: Die Grundlagen durch Leon Battista Alberti und die Weiterentwicklung des basilikalen Fassadenspiegels bis zum Sacco di Roma. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1999.241 pp. + 52 plates. n.p. ISBN: 3-487-10872-0. Michel Paoli. L'idee de nature chez Leon Battista Alberti (J 404- 1472). Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 1999.285 pp. n.p. ISBN: 2-7453-0222-1.

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n a celebrated passage, Cristoforo Landino compared Leon Battista Alberti (1404-74) to a chameleon for his adaptable versatility; and Alberti himself employed animal symbolism in his Apologues and Dinner Pieces, even refashioning his identity by adding the name Leo ("lion") to his Christian name Battista. It is hardly surprising, then, that attempts to describe this multi-faceted genius recall the celebrated Indian parable of the elephant and the six blind men: when asked to describe this enormous beast, each of the men grasped a different part of it and thus proposed a different interpretation. This is not to say that the half-dozen scholars reviewed here are shortsighted, but simply to stress that most approaches to this Protean figure concentrate on but a single part of the whole. The comparison might have pleased Alberti, on whom the symbolic potential of the elephant was not lost. His dinner piece The Spider (Aranea) portrays an elephant as an arrogant colossus, and in Rings (Anuli) an elephant's ear is interpreted as an

© 2002 by the Renaissance Society of America, Inc. All rights reserved.

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emblem of aural receptivity. He also wrote a Latin apologue (now lost) called "The Elephant," as we learn from a letter oEFrancesco Cattani da Diacceto, which was brought to light by Francesco Furlan and Sylvain Matton in the 1993 issue of Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance. Scholars who study Alberti face daunting obstacles and mysterious lacunae. To begin with, Alberti's birth in Genoa in 1404 gave him a marginal position in the society of Renaissance Italy. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the Alberti family had been exiled from their native Florence; and one of the leading bankers of the Alberti clan, Lorenzo, sought refuge in Genoa, where the family had a branch office. Through a liaison with a Genoese woman, Lorenzo begot two illegitimate sons, Battista and Carlo. One might conjecture that Battista regarded being the son of a Tuscan exile as a sort of distinction: the paragon of humanists, Petrarch, and his brother Gherardo, were born in Ara-zo because, like Dante, their father had been exiled from Florence in 1302. But although by law it was possible to legitimize his sons, Lorenzo never took the trouble; and when he died in 1424, Battista had little defense against the unscrupulous cousins who usurped his inheritance. The stigma of illegitimacy thus made Alberti an outsider who would constantly seek to shape and define his own identity, not least by assuming the name Leo (Lion) and by adopting as his motto Virgil, Eclogues 10.28: Quid tum (si Juscus Amyntas)? ("So what, if Amyntas is dark-skinned?") . All the same, Battista received good schooling, studying with the Ciceronian schoolmaster Barzizza in Padua, and advancing to law school in Bologna. But he never quite belonged to the Albertis, and had to seek a familia and employment elsewhere. With a double degree in hand, in both canon and civil law, he found these in the papal Curia around 1432, the year when the exile of the Alberti clan was revoked in Florence. A sort of international think-tank, the papal Curia was restlessly itinerant in the early Quamocento, as the papacy found it difficult to regain its Roman seat after the debilitating strife of the Great Schism. By 1434, Alberti was in Florence, which would constitute his home base until 1443. In Florence, Alberti was stimulated by recent innovations in the visual arts, and soon he was experimenting with perspective and writing about painting. He also came into contact with Tuscan humanists, some of whom advocated using the vernacular as well as Latin. Battista set to work writing about his family in a learned Italian dialogue, but his first attempts at Tuscan prose proved to be as awkward as his relations with his family, and he had to recruit Florentine friends as copy editors. Travels with the Curia introduced him to various Northern Italian courts; and artistic commissions in Ferrara, Rimini, and Mantua led to

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increasingly monumental achievements in architecture, a subject on which he wrote the first treatise since antiquity. But here too his presence is shadowy, since he often directed projects at a distance. Another feature distinguishes Alberti from many of his contemporary humanists. With the exception of the more ambitious De familia, De re aedificatoria, and Momus, he wrote mostly single opuscula which as pieces d'occasion enjoyed only a limited circulation. Alberti made no translations from Greek, wrote no history (apart from a letter on the conspiracy of Stefano Porcari), and never collected his works or letters. Typically, when he assembled some his Intercenales, which were to undergo a codicological diaspora, he wrote vaguely: "I have begun (cepi) to collect my Dinner Pieces into short books." (In his 1465 treatise on cryptography, he alludes to the recent invention of printing: had Alberti lived longer - he died in 1472 - one imagines that he might have tried his hand at the new craft.) In the years following his death, many of his works were either lost or misattributed; and as he was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, his zealous editors Bonucci and Mancini took considerable liberties with the texts they published. Between 1960 and 1973, the late Cecil Grayson produced a three-volume critical edition of the Italian writings, but not all of Alberti's vast and varied Latin output has been so fortunate. Alberti's literary fortunes in part reflect his status as an outsider. His alienation from the Alberti clan, his cool reception in Florentine society, and his geographical rootlessness (he never married) made him at home nowhere but eager to succeed everywhere. He remains crucial to our conception of the Renaissance precisely because he was driven to forge his own identity. In 1438, he composed a succinct Vita about himself in Latin, which he wrote in the third person, following the classical model ofXenophon and Caesar. This autobiography was often considered the work of a close friend and admirer, and this interpretation was perhaps encouraged by the author's common strategy of employing pseudonyms like Lepidus and Philoponius. But its striking portrait of the humanist as philosopher, artist, and multi-talented prodigy proved irresistible to Jacob Burckhardt, who helped establish the term "universal man" in the vocabulary of Renaissance studies. (Yet even here Alberti's originality betrays its classical origins. In their edition of the Vita, Riccardo Fubini and Anna Menci Gallorini point out the Roman precedent for Alberti's versatility in the description of Cato the Elder's versatile ingenium found in Livy, History o/Rome 39.40.5. The expression is also applied to the philosopher Bion by Diogenes Laertius, Lives o/the Philosophers 4.47, in the Latin translation of Ambrogio Traversari which Alberti knew and used.)

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The end of the twentieth century witnessed a veritable boom in the study of this versatile genius. An international congress held in Paris in 1995, whose proceedings are briefly reviewed below, led to the forming of the Societe Internationale Leon Battista Alberti (SILBA). In 1998, SILBA began to print its official journal Albertiana, and Robert Tavernor published On Alberti and the Art a/Building. The next two years saw the publication of the volumes reviewed here. The most ambitious of these books is Anthony Grafton's Leon Battista Alberti, an intellectual biography of the humanist that complements and updates Joan Gadol's groundbreaking 1969 study. The study originated as a series of lectures delivered at Columbia and, while Grafton is particularly sensitive to the humanist's use of classics, he sees important connections with the Quattrocento sociery and the visual arts. But if Grafton, like Alberti an omnivorous polymath, succeeds in negotiating much of this elephantine task, the reader should bear in mind one caveat. The subtitle of the book, "Master Builder," no doubt suggested by the publisher, misleadingly suggests that the book emphasizes Alberti's architecture. Yet it is precisely this topic which remains marginal to Grafton's wide purview: for Alberti's architectural projects, readers must turn to Tavernor's On Alberti and the Art 0/ Building, as well as to Lorch's monograph and the volumes edited by Furlan, cited below. In nine well-crafted chapters, Grafton traces the various stages of Alberti's creative life, from his allegorical quest for identiry in the 1430s to the architectural projects and urban planning of his later years. Grafton sees Alberti's career as epitomizing the "transformation of the Italian urban world," and as reflecting the latest developments in humanism and the visual arts. Although the illegitimate and embittered Alberti often seems a maverick in Quattrocento culture, Grafton's deep knowledge of scholarship and art enables him to make revelatory connections between the humanist and his society, from Florentine patrons and the papal Curia to Northern Italian courts, and to shed light on lesser known contemporaries who moved in the same circles. Chapter one, "Who Was Leon Battista Alberti? ," reviews Alberti scholarship from Burckhardt to the present, and (like Burckhardt) focuses on Alberti's 1438 Life, a third-person autobiography modeled on the classical commentaries ofXenophon and Caesar. Chapter two, "Humanism: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Scholarship," traces Alberti's progress from the Ciceronian and Petrarchan ideals to his early years as a papal scribe in the 1430s. Chapter three, "From New Technologies to Fine Arts," uses the preface to the treatise On Painting as a point of departure in discussing Alberti's optical experiments and his invention of visual emblems; while

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chapter four, "On Painting," provides a close reading of the treatise itself as a humanist handbook. Grafton proceeds in chapter five, "Interpreting Florence," to examine Alberti's relationship to the Florentine mercantile society described in his Italian dialogue On the Family. Chapter six, "The Artist at Court: Alberti in Ferrara," relates how the Este court reshaped Alberti's identity as the "lionizing" courtier of duke Leonello, and paved the way to later architectural commissions. In chapter seven, "His Lost City," Grafton discusses Alberti's antiquarian enthusiasms and projects; while chapter eight, "Alberti on the Art of Building," examines the humanist's monumental and influential treatise on architecture. The final chapter, "The Architect and City Planner," summarizes Alberti's various artistic projects after 1450, from individual churches to Roman city planning. A brief epilogue offers remarks on Alberti's final years and legacy. Mastering an enormously wide and varied bibliography, Grafton has produced a composite portrait of Alberti that is both readable and provocative. Besides adding to our picture of the philologist and antiquarian, he illuminates several of Alberti's artistic achievements, including his contributions to vanishing-point perspective, symbolic emblems, and camera obscura experiments (the endpapers of the volume include miniatures by Giovanni Bettini da Fano that exemplifY such optical studies). Plotting the humanist's biographical and cultural coordinates with magisterial ease and accuracy, Grafton provides the reader with a three-dimensional picture of this often elusive figure. If it is not the complete Alberti, it is a convincing reproduction, and one presented in a vivid recreation of his original habitat. In turn, several European scholars have produced more specialized monographs on Alberti that examine only part of the organic original. By its very title, Michel Paoli's L'idee de nature chez Leon Battista Alberti (J 4041412) evokes the tradition of Paul-Henri Michel's La pensee de Leon Battista Alberti (Paris, 1930). Paoli has shrewdly chosen an idee fixe which unites Alberti's seemingly disparate oeuvre, which he divides generally into moral works, artistic treatises, and ludic writings. Articulated in a thesis-like series of short sections, the book consists of an introductory section and rwo main parts. In "Preliminaires: Alberti et Ie recours 11. la philosophie," Paoli emphasizes Alberti's skeptical attitude toward speculation, in which nature emerges as a criterion of reality. The first major part of the study, "La place de la nature dans la pensee d'Alberti," analyzes the role played by Nature in Alberti's thought, with particular emphasis on religious and philosophical questions. Addressing the "problem of religion" in Alberti (who thus seems to prefigure Rabelais), Paoli discusses the humanist's distance from orthodox views, as reflected in his satire of ecclesiastical institutions and in his avoidance of overtly Christian language

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and references. In Alberti's ethical writings, the concept of nature generally appears in secular contexts, as in the traditional opposition between nature and fortune. In the second major part, "Le recours ala nature dans la reflexion d'Alberti," Paoli examines two complementary branches of Alberti's thought, the socio-political and the esthetic, in which "nature" is a catchword for harmony and aptness within a moral or artistic system. In a famous passage of the Profugia ab erumna, Alberti celebrates the humanist project as an intellectual mosaic that assembles fragments oflearning into a new and harmonious composition. Like others, Paoli exploits this as a metaphor of Alberti's thought, and his monograph can indeed be read as a mosaic of Albertian citations on the topos of nature. What emerges from Alberti's non-satirical dialogues and treatises is the supremacy of nature conceived as order and harmony (concinnitas). Such notions conjoin technical fields like art and architecture with humankind's ethical sphere, in which Alberti can praise both one's personal virtue and an ideal villa for their harmony with nature. The connections between art, the individual, and society are evident in such "natural" metaphors as that of Alberti's Fatum et Fortuna, in which the liberal arts appear as life-saving devices in the torrent oflife. Paoli notes that Nature is often portrayed as a positive counterpart to disruptive Fortune, as well as a supreme principle of perfection of the real world. The strength of Paoli's work lies in his wide-ranging survey of Alberti's thought. But in the end is Alberti's "idea" of nature a philosophical concept or a rhetorical metaphor? Despite scattered references to Cicero and to Quattrocento humanists, Paoli does not clearly situate Alberti's Nature within the rhetorical context of Hellenistic philosophy or Quattrocento humanism. Still, his analysis does much to establish a unifying theme in the often disparate production of Alberti the "chameleon," as if mapping an important segment of his DNA. Perhaps the most rigorous paleontologists of Renaissance studies are its archival historians. Luca Boschetto's Leon Battista Alberti e Firenze, which grew out of a 1997 Pisa tesi di perJezionamento, sheds considerable light on both Alberti's life and writings, supplementing the classic biography by Girolamo Mancini with material discovered in the records of the Mercanzia (Merchants' Court) in the Archivio di Stato in Florence. Boschetto seems to be the first scholar to have made a systematic search of these records for evidence about Alberti. The volume is divided into four parts. In Part I, "La famiglia Alberti alla fine dell' esilio," Boschetto gives a detailed picture of the family's history and finances with special emphasis on Florence and on the crisis of the Alberti "companies" outside Tuscany in 1437-39. There is a wealth of information

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on the extended familial and financial network of the Alberti clan from the late Trecento to the middle of the Quattrocento. Special attention is paid to events following the 1428 revocation of their exile - a period illuminated by the new institution of the Florentine catasto. With rich documentation, Boschetto shows how slowly members of the family returned to Florence, and he sheds new light on the financial crisis of the late 1430s, adding to the work of Giovanni Ponte. Part II, "Battista," constitutes a new biography of the humanist, which revises Mancini according to recent studies and Boschetto's own research. With the exception of Alberti's architectural projects, this portrait covers the entirety of Alberti's life in chapters on the young Alberti (1404-34), on his stays in Florence (1435-44), and on his later connections with the city (1445-72). Naturally, the second chapter discusses Alberti's advocacy of the vernacular, which culminated in the bitter outcome of the Certame Coronario of 144l. Besides redating several of Alberti's writings, Boschetto highlights the financial and political background to which Alberti but indirectlyalludes. His relations with prominent figures such as Leonardo Bruni, Agnolo Pandolfini, and Piero de' Medici here emerge from the shadows to suggest the role played by the "outsider" Alberti in the higher circles of Florentine politics and culture. Of particular interest is the fine analysis of Alberti's dialogue Profogia ab erumna, which relates the literary role of the interlocutor Agnolo Pandolfini to the realities of Medicean politics. And there are new insights about several of Alberti's key friends - litterati such as Francesco d'Aitobianco Alberti, Leonardo Dati, Niccolo Cerretani, and Marco Parenti. The end of the chapter discusses Alberti's friendship with Landino and Lorenzo de' Medici, and offers interesting observations on the fortune of the humanist's work. Ironically, with the exception of the Theogenius, the Italian compositions associated with Florence suffered the greatest eclipse: Book II of De familia was attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini, while the poems and De iciarchia barely survived in manuscript. Part III consists of over 100 pages and contains sixty documents concerning Alberti. Drawn from archival sources, they are preceded by brief synopses and accompanied by a critical apparatus. Part IV offers a rich bibliography and full index of names, including Alberti's single works. It is difficult to praise Boschetto too highly for providing so much new light, both documentary and interpretive, on the biographical details of this enigmatic figure. In the anthropology of Renaissance studies, examining a single artifact can lead to important conclusions. As part of an ongoing project sponsored by the Paris-based Societe Internationale Leon Battista Alberti, Martine Furno and Mario Carpo present Alberti's Descriptio urbis Romae in a critical

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edition that features the original Latin text with a French translation and commentaries. (The French guise of Alberti should not surprise the modern reader, since French presses were among the first to vulgarize his amatory works in the later Quattrocento.) And the collaborators have rendered a great service in placing this important text within its cultural context. Sometime toward the middle of the fifteenth century, Alberti surveyed the monuments of Rome and wrote a short tract with tables to allow others to plot his findings using polar coordinates based on the Capitoline Hill. His attempt represents a first in modern topography, but the text describing his method and its results survives in only six manuscripts and was not published until the nineteenth century. Yet despite its brevity, the text is of considerable interest, not only to cartographers, but also to Roman archaeologists who will find here a record of monuments extant before the extensive predations of High Renaissance popes. The volume consists of three sections that help define the cultural context of this brief and ground-breaking opusculum. First, Martine Furno offers a detailed description of the six manuscript witnesses, a critical Latin text with appended notes, and a French translation. Second, there are two essays on the Descriptio and its cultural context, the first by Furno and the second by Mario Carpo (translated from an Italian essay that appeared in AIbertiana). Carpo insists on the "rhetorical" nature of the work, while Furno examines Alberti's approach to the problem, stressing his debt to Ptolemy's Cosmographia (which he evidently knew in the early Quattrocento translation of Jacopo da Scarperia) and his adaptation of Ptolemaic terms such as aux, augis "apogee." Third, there are two appendices containing (1) references to classical monuments in Petrarch, Flavio Biondo, Poggio Bracciolini, and Giovanni Tortelli, and (2) French translations of the relevant passages from these humanists. The volume concludes with a bibliography, four illustrations, and an index. All of the material presented here aids us in interpreting Alberti's singular project. The editors rightly stress that Alberti's Descriptio is not a treatise on surveying techniques, but rather a recipe for reproducing an existing survey in any dimensions desired. (Alberti seems to have surveyed the city by "triangulation" from a number of points, not just from the central Capitolium. This method is described in his Ludi mathematici, but he makes no reference to it in the Descriptio - hence the editors' emphasis on his "rhetorical" approach in this tract.) Yet oddly enough, the edition fails to realize Alberti's instructions. To be sure, there are four illustrations of what might be called a "polar compass" - two from Quattrocento codices and two partial photographs of the survey as realized by a Grenoble architect in 1990. But there is no complete image of the survey plotted using Alberti's method

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and data, and curious readers will have to return to the illustration provided by Orlandi and Vagnetti in their study of the work, which appeared in the Convegno internazionale indetto nel V centenario di L.B. Alberti (Rome, 1974). It is as if an edition of the Musical Offering were content merely to analyze and reproduce Bach's canons without printing a score or realizing a performance of the work. Carpo asserts that "Ie texte de la Descriptio n' est pas Ie complement d'une image: il est I'ersatz d'un dessin, qu'il remplace" (73). But surely a list of polar coordinates must be translated into images, rather than into French. Not merely a "rhetorical" ekphrasis, Alberti's descriptio deserves to be transcribed visually as well as verbally. The earliest modern excavations of antiquities were often a German endeavor, and the same holds true of art-historical approaches to humanist architecture. As his title suggests, Ingomar Lorch's Die Kirchenfossade in Italien von 1450 bis 1527: Die Grundlagen durch Leon Battista Alberti und die Weiterentwicklung des basilikalen Fassadenspiegels bis zum Sacco di Roma offers a clearly focused study. Lorch proceeds from a well-known fact of Renaissance architecture, namely, that while Brunelleschi is responsible for new classicizing models of church construction, Alberti was the first to design church facades. In two of his most important commissions, the Tempio Malatestiano and Santa Maria Novella, Alberti treats the facade as applied decoration that is analogous to existing internal structures but uses different materials. In Lorch's view, these two churches establish the first of two patterns that influenced Renaissance facades, particularly in the period before 1500: notable examples of Albertian influence include San Michele in Isola in Venice, Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, and Santa Cristina in Bolsena. After that date, the second pattern was set by the colossal orders of Alberti's San Sebastiano and Sant'Andrea, both in Mantua, which inspired Santa Maria Annunziata in Roccaverano, the Sagra in Carpi, and various unrealized projects like the cathedral in Vigevano. Lorch's study begins with a discussion of Alberti's four facades, including a lengthy discussion of the complex problems involved in reconstructing the architect's design for San Sebastiano. A series of succinct chapters on Tuscan, Venetian, and Roman churches demonstrate the influence of Albertian facades before 1500. Next, several chapters examine the development of the church facade in the early Cinquecento, together with two monumental projects - the design competition for San Lorenzo in Florence (never realized), and early plans for the rebuilding of St. Peter's in Rome. Lorch's detailed analyses of over twenty-five church facades are supplemented by 51 black-and-white plates at the end of the volume. The entire study is written with such clarity that even a non-specialist can follow the argument.

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Every industry creates its own professional organizations and plans regular meetings, and Alberti studies are no exception. The largest of the recent contributions to Alberti studies is the two-volume Leon Battista Alberti: Congres International, Paris, 10-15 avril 1995, edited by Francesco Furlan, which collects the proceedings of this (non-revolutionary) Parisian convention, grouping the papers in six sections: Biography, Autobiography, and Historical Context; Readings, Sources, and Culture; The Dialogues and "Ludi"; Art and Technical Treatises; Architecture and Urban Planning: Theory and Practice; and Influence and Fortune. (The website for SILBA is www.silba.msh-paris.fr, and a bibliography can be found at http:// ourworld.compuserve. com/ homepages/mpaoli.) The sheer variety and bulk of these volumes - more than fifty papers filling more than a thousand pages - make it impossible to review them here, but readers interested in Alberti will find valuable contributions here on nearly every aspect of his life and work. Naturally, there are essays by some of the usual suspects: Luca Boschetto on the Alberti bank crisis of the 1430s, Michel Paoli on portraits of the humanist, and the present writer's discussion of Apuleius and Alberti. It is an invidious task to single out particularly fine contributions, but special mention should be made of Arturo Calzona on Alberti and Ludovico Gonzaga, Paolo Viti on Alberti and Medici politics, and Florence Vuilleumier on astronomy and the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo. As we enter the new millennium, then, Alberti studies are proliferating at an auspicious rate. We may not yet know everything about this colossal figure, but the picture is increasingly detailed and fascinating.

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THE SELF-EXPRESSED: LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY''