Home	Leon Battista Alberti: The Life of Leon Battista Alberti, Florentine Architect [1404-1472]
	ALBERTI, LEON BATTISTA ( 1404-1472), Florentine humanist, architect, art theorist, poet, painter, and mathematician. Alberti was born in Genoa and was the second natural son of exiled Florentine Lorenzo Alberti and Bolognese widow Bianca di Carlo Fieschi. Battista Alberti, who later added Leo or Leon to his name, belonged to one of the most prominent and prosperous merchant and banking families of the bourgeois aristocracy of Florence. That family, however, like others that had aligned themselves with the popular political factions, had been banished from Florence in 1387 for opposing the ruling faction headed by the oligarchical Albizzi family. In 1406, at the time of the plague that took their mother's life, Lorenzo removed his sons, Battista and Carlo, first to Venice and then to Padua, where the young Alberti, like other prominent educators and humanists of his generation, received the finest available classical literary education. In 1421, at the age of seventeen, Leon Battista went to Bologna to study canon law. In the same year, both his father and his paternal uncle died. His relatives soon appropriated the inheritance left to him and his brother, and they refused to support him. Whether they did so from malice or because Alberti refused to assume a role in the family business is not clear. The following years were difficult ones in which Leon Battista was dogged by poverty and illness. Nonetheless, he persevered in his studies and continued to read the Greek and Latin classics so dear to him. This personal experience of hardship perhaps confirmed in him the belief, echoed in his later writings, that one is the product of one's own will and effort and that fortune, fickle and hostile, defeats only those who let themselves be defeated. His views on the difficulties faced by the intellectual in society are first expressed in the early work De commodis et incommodis literarum ( 1430, The Pains and Pleasures of a Man of Letters). Earlier, in the period 1424-26, Alberti had authored a Latin comedy, Philodoxeos (Philodoxus), which he passed off successfully as the work of a classical Roman poet named Lepidus. In 1432, Alberti was in Rome, where he had been granted the first benefice of his ecclesiastical career: an appointment as apostolic abbreviator, or secretary, in the papal chancery at the court of Pope Eugemus IV. He was to hold that position until 1464. Enchanted by Rome, Alberti spent the following two years studying its ancient monuments, from which he was to derive some, perhaps too many, of his own architectural principles. In 1435, the sentence of banishment having been lifted, Alberti went to Florence with the pope. There, as he tells us in the dedicatory letter to Filippo Brunelleschi that precedes his treatise De pictura ( 1436, On Painting), a work which influenced Leonardo Da Vinci among others, he was greatly impressed with the genius of that city's artists, including Donatello, Masaccio, Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia, and Brunelleschi himself. From then on he would spend most of his time in Florence or in Rome. In 1447, he became architectural adviser to the new pope, Nicholas V, whom Alberti knew from their student years together in Bologna. Throughout his life he dedicated himself to exploring numerous fields of knowledge, and as a result of his contributions to the arts, sciences, and letters, he has been acclaimed as the embodiment of the Renaissance* ideal of the universal man. If there is one notion that provides a unifying element in Alberti's thought, it is the belief that nature is a rationally ordered system which can serve as a heuristic model for man in his attempt to put order into human existence. According to Alberti, the imitation of nature allows man to discover and employ his own rationality, the source of that inner strength, or virtù, which will enable him to become the master of his own destiny. When Alberti, in his treatise On Painting, advises the painter to imitate nature, it is the process of nature that he means for him to imitate. The painter should not simply copy what he sees, but neither should he give form to what cannot be seen in nature. To painter and sculptor alike, Alberti recommends the use of live models in order to avoid growing used to one's own errors. By conquering space and time, painting will give to the artist a divine perspective, and ultimately, he says, the painter will be praised as though he were a god. The painter, Alberti says, should be versed in the liberal arts, especially in geometry, and can learn a great deal from the poet. He should also be a good person if he aspires to gainful employment as an artist. Alberti, who had been trained in a scholastic environment at the University of Padua, begins his discussion of perspective in painting by asking the reader to consider him as a painter, not as a mathematician, because the latter is too theoretical and unconcerned with the material while painters deal with visible things. This insistence on grounding his discussion in the real world is a clear indication of Alberti's intensely practical world view, which would not allow theoretical speculation to be divorced from life and from practical application in the world. Indeed, man's true spirituality is revealed in his involvement in human affairs and in his commitment to being a productive member of society. Nevertheless, Alberti's treatise on painting was a departure from the recipe books of Cimabue and other painters of the past and was instrumental in changing the status of the painter from that of craftsman to inspired creative artist, if not, indeed, to that of an intellectual. While painting is important for Alberti, insofar as it idealizes that which it shows and teaches both viewer and painter, perhaps architecture is the most important of the arts in his intensely practical vision of life. Architecture, born of both necessity and a natural instinct to build, serves as a unifying force that regulates and harmonizes the activity of the city. In his De iciarchia (circa 1470, On Governing a Household), Alberti draws an analogy between the family, the republic, and the human body. And in De re aedificatoria (begun in 1449 but not printed until 1485, Ten Books of Architecture), patterned on Vitruvius and destined to become a classic in its own right, he compares the human body to a building. Alberti's thought contains a psychophysical parallelism suggesting that the state of mind is reflected in the condition of the physical being. This applies not only to the individual but to the family and to society as a whole as well. Physical education, family management, and urban planning are thus linked in an aesthetic vision of a world that, like a work of art, is governed by human reason. Alberti adapts the relativistic and skeptical assertion of the Greek philosopher Protagoras that man is the measure of all things and changes it to establish a positive mechanical standard by which all things are to be measured. The body becomes the guide to geometric proportion in architecture as well as the metaphorical instrument for defining the harmonic nature of the family and, by extension, the "body politic." Architects should design buildings which convey a sense of harmony (concinnitas is one of life's guiding principles) and a sense of man controlling space rather than being controlled by it, a lesson ignored by Mussolini and the masters of fascist architecture in the twentieth century. This sense of harmony in art, architecture, and in the social fabric, Alberti felt in his more optimistic mature years, was one of the elements needed to bring happiness, tranquility, and fame and glory to the individual as well as to society as a whole. This harmony, as Rudolph Wittkower notes with respect to Alberti's views on architecture, "does not result from personal fancy, but from objective reasoning" (33). Understandably, in his work Della famiglia ( 1433-39, The Family in Renaissance Florence), Alberti reverses his earlier view on the acquisition of wealth and implies that poverty is a kind of disfigurement, to be avoided. The individual, whose principal aim is to be a good citizen, is expected to make the most of himself and also, as Alberti often repeats, to be useful to others. The generation of 1420 regarded the arts in a very different spirit. For them painting consisted first and foremost in the rendering of the outside world according to the principles of human reason. Therefore they could no longer acknowledge a theory of the arts which did not allow any place to naturalism or to the scientific study of the material world. The new ideas which they formulated are most fully expressed in the writings of Leon Battista Alberti, whose universal intelligence particularly suited him for expounding a doctrine which affected all branches of human activity--political life, and philosophy, just as much as literature and the arts. Alberti did not, of course, leap into a wholly unprepared world with a ready-made theory. There had been men before him who had hinted at the doctrines which he was to enunciate with such clarity and completeness. In Cennino Cennini, for instance, we find traces of the new naturalism which was already growing up in the Trecento, and in Lorenzo Ghiberti the new feeling for antiquity makes its appearance. But these and the other points of detail which can be traced in writers before Alberti's time are only indications of what is to come. Their real significance only becomes clear when we consider them in connexion with the whole new view of the arts and of the world as we find it set forth in Alberti. In addition to his influential treatises on art and on the family, Alberti wrote several vernacular dialogues, including Theogenius (circa 1440, Theogenius) and Profugiorum ab aerumna ( 1441-42, Flight from Hardship), which deal with the conflict between virtiù and fortune, reaffirming the importance of reason as a guide and source of comfort in adversity. He also composed Intercenales (circa 1441, Convivial Dialogues), a grammar of the Tuscan language, and several amorous writings in prose and verse reflecting his personal experience in love and his misogyny. His many interests were joined by his belief that literature, art, and science can serve the useful civic function of improving the quality of human life. In his width of knowledge, as well as in his rational and scientific approach, Alberti was typical of the early Humanists. He worked apparently with equal ease in the fields of philosophy, science, classical learning, and the arts. He wrote pamphlets or treatises on ethics, love, religion, sociology, law, mathematics, and different branches of the natural sciences. He also wrote verses, and his intimacy with the Classics was so great that two of his own works, a comedy and a dialogue in the manner of Lucian, were accepted as newly discovered writings of the ancients. In the arts, he practised and wrote about painting, sculpture, and architecture. Indeed, his grasp of all forms of learning was so encyclopaedic that he well deserved the praise written by a contemporary copyist in a manuscript of the Trivi: "'Dic quid tandem nesciverit hic vir?'" Alberti's views about the arts are so closely dependent on his general philosophical attitude that it is worth while analysing the latter in some detail. His outlook on life was precisely that of the Humanists of the first half of the fifteenth century, and corresponds to the conception of the city-state as it existed in Florence before the final triumph of Cosimo de' Medici. For Alberti the highest good is the public interest. To this princes and individual citizens are equally bound. The prince must govern in the interests of the citizens, preserve their liberties, and obey the laws of the city, or he becomes a tyrant. Above all the peace of the city must be preserved, and Alberti strongly condemns the factions which arouse civil strife and from which his own family had suffered so much. Those who hold office under the prince must equally seek the general good. The judge, for instance, whose functions Alberti discusses at length, must administer the law with firmness but with moderation and humanity, so that public and private interest may be protected, but so that no greater suffering than is necessary may be inflicted on those who infringe the law. Some of his views on punishment are strangely modern; for though he admits the use of torture as a means of arriving at the truth, he attacks the bad prisons of his time and sets down the principle that prisons are intended to reform, not to destroy, the criminal. Alberti is not a strict republican. In the fifth book of the treatise on architecture he discusses the different forms of government, and though he approves strongly of the republiccity he does not exclude the idea of government by a prince, provided that he governs in the interests of the city. But when Alberti speaks of the public good, he does not mean the good of some abstract entity, 'the State', he means the good of all the individual citizens who make up the State. And he is therefore as much interested in the individual citizen as in the prince or those who govern for the prince. The first aim of the individual is to be a good citizen, that is to say, to serve his fellow-citizens as far as possible. He can only attain this end by the pursuit of virtue, and it is to methods of acquiring virtue that Alberti devotes most of his purely ethical writings. His rules can be summarized as follows. The individual must seek virtue by the application of the will, by the use of reason, and by following nature. Will supplies the driving force. A man, he says, can achieve as much as he wishes to achieve. But it is only through reason that he can know what he should aim at, and what he should avoid. Finally man must follow nature in the sense that he must know the end for which he was created, and try to attain it; he must discover why nature gave him certain faculties, and develop them, unless he is sure that they are bad. So, for instance, Alberti believes that man must aim at spiritual good and not be bound by the senses and the passions; he must be superior to material things and so be independent of fate. Yet he is strongly opposed to the extreme of Stoicism as represented by the Cynicism of Diogenes, since he finds it contrary to nature. It is inhuman not to be moved by any emotions at all. What man needs is to be moderate in his feelings, and to enjoy the things of this world without being tied to them. In fact, the moderation which is one of the results of following reason is the most significant and often recurring feature of Alberti's doctrine. It leads to the calm of mind which is for him a necessary condition for the right conduct of life.