Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture, Part 17: Architecture, Representation, & Politics

Episode Topic: Architecture, Representation, & Politics

Caspar Pearson, director of studies and reader in Art History 1300-1700 at the Warburg Institute in London, shares his work on Leon Battista Alberti, the early Renaissance humanist scholar and architect, and one of history’s most influential writers and thinkers on art and architecture.

Featured Speakers:
-Caspar Pearson, Warburg Institute

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This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture.

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Transcript

Introduction to Dr. Casser Pearson

1 0:06

My name is Mario Yohara. I'm an assistant professor of Art and Architectural History here in the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame. And it's my great pleasure, privilege to introduce a Dr. Casser Pearson, a speaker this evening. Dr. Pearson is an art architectural historian whose area of expertise is in the Italian Renaissance. his scholarship is characterized by a rigorous study of both the history of architecture and the history of ideas, something very few people can do truly well. I believe, we see these two areas of interest mapped out in Dr. Pearson's education. He attended the University of Birmingham and the UK where he studied both philosophy and art history, and it was there that he also earned his master's degree in art history. He subsequently received his PhD from the University of Essex, where his doctoral project on architecture and urbanism in the works of ti married those two areas of interest together, something that many of us in the Notre Dame community have in common with Dr. Pearson is time spent in Rome. Dr. Pearson held, held postdoctoral fellowships and teaching appointments in Rome while also writing and publishing his research on Alberti. Since, uh, fast forward to since 2020, Dr. Pearson has served as director of Studies at the Warburg Institute in London. If you're unfamiliar with the Warburg, it is a premier center for art historical research, which offers graduate programs for MA and PhD students and fellowship opportunities for scholars. The Warburg Institute's Library holds a collection of international importance in the humanities. It's, 30 360,000 volume collection, make it the largest collection in the world focused on renaissance studies and the history of the classical tradition. The founder of the institute, Abby Warberg, scholar of Renaissance art history himself believe that the memory of the past activates, activates the present. And the institute today continues to support global cultural history and the role of images in society according to that core belief. I'll just say a few more words about Dr. Pearson's scholarship before handing over the mic this evening. His first book, humanism and the Urban World, ti and the Renaissance City appeared in print in 2011 from Pennsylvania State University Press. His most recent book, which appeared in 2022, is also about Alberti, called The Chameleon's Eye. This volume is part of Reaction books, Renaissance Lives series. And through these two books and his various journal article publications, Dr. Pearson has given us new frameworks for understanding this important 15th century figure. Alberti is someone who is difficult to grasp fully, even for specialists, often referred to as the first universal man. Alberti was a polymath who worked not only as an architect and a humanist scholar, but also as a linguist, philosopher, playwright, art critic, a mathematician among other things, Florentine by birth, but often living abroad and exile even in his, even his contemporaries called Alberta Chameleon. an animal capable of blending in with, with whatever environment it chooses to inhabit while remaining in reality, an outsider to all. And as a result, historians have tended to fail, to fall into two traps, either worshiping Alberti as a superhuman, heroic polymath like our statue outside us, or vilifying him for his individualism and Dante amateurism. Through his research though, Dr. Pearson shows us how Albert's theoretical formulations, particularly as they relate to architecture and urbanism, link up with his personal biography in subtle nuanced ways, peeling back the cust the costume layers to get at the heart of Alberta's intentionality, especially in relationship to his thoughts about space making. Tonight the lecture is titled Architecture Representation and Politics Ti on the City State. Please join me in welcoming Casper Pearson.

Alberti's Exile and Return to Florence

The Spider Simile and Household Economy

Alberti's Views on Governance and the City

Alberti's Architectural Engagement and Pictorial Thinking

2 5:06

Okay. Well, um, thank you for that incredibly kind introduction. I always think I sound better in the third person hearing, uh, myself being described by someone else. I'm very grateful to have been invited to speak here in the renowned School of architecture at Notre Dame. Um, apart from anything else, it is quite something. As a scholar who works on Leon Batista Alberti to come to a place that has a 13 foot high bronze sculpture of the man, in his treatise on painting, Alberti says that the great work of the painting is not a colossus, but a hysteria or a history painting. but I suspect he would've changed his mind if he'd seen that statue. In any case, this seems a very fitting place to be speaking about Alberti. So, um, just a quick introduction for those of you who are not familiar with him and recap. For those of you who are alberti, just advance this well. Okay? Oh, okay. Brilliant. Thank you. Okay, so, Alberti was born in Genoa in northern Italy in 1404, and he lived until 1472. He was a humanist scholar, so fundamentally he was a moral philosopher who also wrote treaties on the visual arts, including a major work on architecture, DeRay Ida Kaori, or on the art of building. Which was the first architectural treatise to be produced in Europe since ancient times in later life, in a move that was at the time unprecedented for a humanist. he actually turned to practice and began to operate as an architect, and its in connection with architecture and urbanism that I want to talk about from today. But I'm going to do so not in relation to his architectural treaties or to the handful of buildings that he was involved in designing, but through some of his other works in which he thinks in a more oblique way, uh, about buildings in the city and above all the city of Florence where his family originally came from. in particular, I want to explore how his thoughts about Florence and its buildings might be inflected by, and especially. Pictorial mode of thinking. So how his thinking about architecture is inflected by his thinking about paintings. Okay. So first of all, just a bit of background about the Alberti family as this will set the scene for what follows. So the Alberti were one of Florence's elite families, and they were key players in the city's Republican government in the 13 hundreds. They were the owners of a huge international banking business, which stretched from northern Europe all the way to the near East. and by the 1370s they had become, according to some contemporaries, the richest citizens of Florence. And there was quite a lot of comp. You know, it's a place where there's a lot of rich people. Uh, they were apparently for a while the richest. Increasingly active in politics. They aligned themselves with the Richie family, the leaders of what is sometimes called, uh, the liberal faction, which basically favored a slightly, uh, wider participation in the Republican government. Now, when a proletarian revolution led by the Chompy, those are the wool workers, the workers in the wool industry, sprang up, erupted in 1378, the two most prominent Alberti Beso, that's the grandfather of Leon Batista and his cousin Riano Dicho. They immediately jumped on the revolution's coattails and they lent it their support, and Benedetto was rewarded with a knighthood from that point on for almost 10 years, he and Riano were at the very apex of the Republican system, wielding a degree of power that was unmatched by any other family. They were basically for about 10 years in, the 14th century, they became something like, you know, what the mechi would become, uh, for a lot longer in the 15th century. But this situation ended abruptly in 1378 when the Alberti enemies, the oligarchic faction, led by the Al Beaty family, managed to regain the upper hand, and they sent the alberti into exile. Now, the exclusion of the Alberti from Florence was a piecemeal process that initially affected only Benedetto, Deso and Cipriano Decia. So in a first decree, they were both made ineligible for political office. and they were banned from entering any of the buildings associated with the chief organs of the state. So those are the palaces. Housing, the ria, that's the main government council, the PO star, that's the chief magistrate, uh, the captain of the people, and other officials called the executors of the ordinances of justice. I'm just, just highlighted their palaces on the map there. So that's their first exclusion. They had to keep out of those buildings the next day. A new decree, commanded that Benedetto and Riano should remove themselves, from Florence entirely within eight days, and that within another 10 days, they should be at least 100 miles from the city. Where they should remain for two years. So these were the first in a series of measures that ultimately resulted in 1401 in the banishment of all male members of the family, some to this distance of a hundred miles, others to 180 miles, and still others to a massive 300 miles from the city. And by the way, these, these rings aren't accurate. I tried. I couldn't. It's just, it just gives, just gives you a sense. and this state of affairs persisted for more than a quarter of a century during which time that alberti men orbited that these fixed distances around a city whose government still sought to regulate many aspects of their lives, even as it forbade them to approach. So when you are exiled, unless you're actually declared a rebel, you would think when you are exiled, you are just out. And that's that. But actually not, you are still very much. The clause of the administration of the city, because you're still a citizen. You're just a really bad citizen. So this is the situation into which Batista Alberti better known to us through his later act of self naming as Leon Batista Alberti. So he gives himself this name, Leon in Latin, or Leon? Leon in Italian, meaning the lion. This is the situation into which he was born in Genoa in 1404. Just show me there. He was a natural, or that is to say illegitimate child. And he was the grandson of Benedetto Deso, the man who had led the Alberti first to the great heights of success and then to the depth of failure in the 14th century. Now, by the time that the Alberti were readmitted to Florence in 1428, Batista was already an adult. A scholar called Lauren Berninger has recently discovered and published new documents, and this is a very important find that show that Alberti was already in Florence by about 1429 and enrolled at the university as a student of Canon law. So that's a degree that he must have obtained in Florence rather than in Bologna, where he had first embarked on his legal studies following a period in Rome. He returned to Florence in 1434 when he was 30 years old. Now, by this time, he had embarked on a literary career as a humanist scholar, and he had found employment as a bureaucrat with the papacy. And it's in this last capacity that he found himself back in the Tuscan city, following the papal cur. After his employer, Pope Eugenius IV lost his grip on the city of Rome and was driven out by a mob, uh, and stayed out for the best part of a decade. So Alberta's second Sergeant in Florence seems to have coincided with what Lucia Bertolini has called a euphoric phase in his writings. And his approach to the city at this time can be closely associated with two texts in particular. So his treaties on the family that day, familiar or Della familiar, uh, he tended to give his, works, Latin titles even when they were written in the vernacular. Tuscan, and his treatise on painting de Pictor, both of which were seemingly composed first in the vernacular Tuscan dialect, although Alberti later translated de Pictura into Latin. Now later on, he claimed that he wrote the Della Familia in Rome in 1434. Though it seems that at least some of the third book must have become, been composed in Florence the following year, 1435. The day. Pictura, on the other hand, he recorded very specifically as having been completed in Florence at a quarter to nine on the evening of the 26th of August, 1435. It's kind of amazing to have, uh, that kind of precision, for a date. And so these two works are thus near contemporary or perhaps actually contemporary texts. And what I want to do for the remainder of my time is to read some parts of them together and to think about how they reflect on al bet's long phased return to Florence at the end of the families. Many years of exile. So as many people here will know, probably anyone who's had to take a a, a class in Renaissance art history, the day Pictura is a short treatise written in three books in which the author speaks directly in his own voice. It begins with a difficult section on optics and geometry, explaining how site functions through visual rays that connect objects to the eye and setting out for the first time the principles of a one point perspective construction. In the second book, Alberti comes to the heart of his discussion introducing the concept of composition. and, by this he means the bringing together of members, so that's body parts in order to produce bodies. And he then goes on to explain how in a painting those bodies can then be set to work, adopting a variety of gestures and postures and expressions to create a visual narrative or what he calls a histor. That's an intelligible image that relates a story, and that also performs a sort of moral inquiry. Now, in contrast to this. Della Familia. I didn't really have a good image for the Della Familia, but, um, this is, uh, Alberta's own sort of emblem that he adopted for himself of the Winged Eye. the Della Familia is a much longer work. It's a fictional dialogue between members of the Alberti family that involves characters based on real people, including the author himself. Now, these characters engage in a wide ranging discussion about family life, which touches on many subjects, including politics and the wider civic world of the Italian city states. The part that is most often read now and was also the most popular in the Renaissance is the third book in which the thrifty old patriarch Jan. So Alberti explains to the young humanist Leonardo his practice of Maia or household economy in a discussion that is partly modeled on ancient texts, by people like Xenon. Now, for all of their differences, these two texts, the. Treat is on painting and the treat is on the family. Do share some key preoccupations, for example. Both of them tend to foreground and center the self, and both are marked by an intense concern with individual will in the day. Pictura Alberti insists that he is the only true origin of his discourse, claiming to speak from his own experience as a painter, which is quite audacious given that he wrote it in Florence, surrounded by excellent professional painters. He himself was an amateur. At best. He relies on his own judgment and he never submits to any higher authority. We, we might consider in this regard how he begins his account of perspective. So this is the process of making a checkerboard pavement out of orthogonal lines that all meet at a single vanishing point and transversal lines that are placed across them at ever decreasing intervals. Alberti describes two diagrams that are required to realize disorder. One in which the picture is seen from the front, and a second one in which we, as it were, view the pictorial space abstractedly from the side. In the second case, lines are drawn from the eye of the ideal observer. Herem made monocular so one eye and reduced to a point to marks on a baseline, representing the true as it were, position of the, transversal. And the lines of sight are then cut with a perpendicular corresponding to the picture plane, uh, and placed at whatever distance the artist decides the painting should be viewed from. It is in this manner that the placement of the transversal is determined. Now, ultimately, this system allows the painter to produce a convincing illusion of a three-dimensional space and to diminish in a geometrically consistent way the size of objects in a picture as they move further from the eye of the viewer. Now when Alberti begins his explanation of all of this, he says, let me tell you what I do when I'm painting. First of all, on the surface on which I'm going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen. And I decide how large I wish the human figures in the painting to be. So the passage makes repeated use of the pronouns E that's I and me, and uses an insistent first person to make it clear that everything about the perspective construction and thus the subsequent painting rests on the author's own arbitration as he says, I do, I want, I decide. From this passage, one gets the feeling that the mathematical nexus within which the painting is to be contained exists not only to aid my ESIS per se, but also to guarantee a zone of complete control in which the key determining factor is the painter's own gaze, which viewed from the side is sectioned, rarefied, and rendered as an objective ordering principle. One that provides the measure to which everything else must conform. Now, these preoccupations also inform some parts of the dela familia there. Gena practice of masseria or household economy also outlines a powerful technique of control, one in which the self is again to be found at the dead center of things. The parallels are most clear in an extraordinary and vivid passage in which Janot saw compares his own manner of arranging things to that of a spider. and what he says is this, you have seen how the spider arranges the threads of his web in rays so that each one of them, no matter how long finds its beginning, its roots, its point of origin in the center where that most industrious animal dwells. Once it has woven and ordered its work, it dwells there, alert and diligent, so that if any of the threats, no matter how minute or distant is touched, it feels, it immediately rushes there and takes care of everything. This is what the head of the family should do. Let him study his affairs and arrange them so that they all depend on him, originate with him, and find support in the safest places. Then let him stay there in the center vigilant and quick to hear and see everything. And if something should require his attention, let him take care of it immediately. So this similarly suggests that the patriarch must construct a world that is in every way an extension of the self, a web of relations in which all things have their origin in his will alone. Moreover, this figure who stays in the center vigilant and quick to hear and see everything inhabits and order that is markedly spatial and visual in character. The similarly might even be considered painterly or at least pictorial, something that Janot so seems to announce at the start. When he says that he will, and I quote, tell you, and as it were, paint for you and place here before your eyes, that which he wishes to say There are also some commonalities between the ways in which Alberti speaks of a painting and a spider's web. Since he says that both must be woven or stitched together, the word is tetto, more strikingly. The threads, what he calls the kine of the web, are arranged in Rays rap. A word which Alberta uses repeatedly in the day. Pictor when describing the visual rays that are the primary vehicles of sight. And just as the visual rays converge to form a pyramid in which they all meet at a single point in the eye of the spectator. So in the web, all of the rays meet at one point in the center where the spider dwells. So there are vast, clear echoes in the spider patriarchs network of pure vision and control of the painter's visual pyramid. But there are also echoes of the perspective grid. I'm a massive arachnephobe. I, I can't even, a picture of a spider is devastating to me. So it, I had to search for one where there wasn't one and it was pretty traumatic along the way. I can tell you, um. So there are echoes here of the perspective grid. Indeed the spider seems to inhabit the impossible position of the vanishing point itself, or the centric point in Alberta's terms, looking out along orthogonals that now appear divergent rather than convergent, and that are crossed by transversal that form a set of concentric circles. But more than this, the simile also has an architectural character since a literary tradition did consider spiders to be natural architects, along with bees swallows and so forth, as well as being natural geometries, on account of the precision of their webs. And what I find particularly fascinating then is that the spider's web can be seen in this passage as the perfect fusion of architecture and picture making, since it is at once, both a kind of building and a two dimensional picture or diagram. And just as we saw that Alberti spins the theory of perspective from his own self, which he posits as the only origin. The same is manifestly and literally the case here with the spider where everything finds its beginning and, point of origin in the center where the patriarch arranges his affairs so that he's the origin of everything and they all depend on him. So to summarize, in Jana's telling, it seems that the head of the family must try to organize his world into a kind of geometrical picture whose meaning depends entirely upon his position at the center of it. Now if this seems to hint, at a pictorial, architectonic way of thinking about the world, that is to say the organization of one's immediate ambit into a sort of historia of one's own, then we can perhaps find other such hint. Hint in the day Pictor itself. So about after a year after he had completed the first draft of the treatise, Alberti sent a more worked up version of the text to the architect, Philippo Brunelleschi, attaching a letter in which he speaks of his joy at the return of the Alberti family to Lawrence. In the process, he heaps praise on contemporary Florentine artists, comparing them as great geniuses to giants and commending Bruno, les's role in the construction of the dome of Florence Cathedral, and especially his invention of a method by which it could be built without the use of wooden centering. And, uh, I'm sure a lot of you are, are, familiar with this. So in a very often quoted passage, Alberti says. What man, however hard of heart or jealous would not praise ppo. That's a sort of familiar name for Felipo, would not praise ppo, the architect when he sees here such an enormous construction towering above the skies, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow and done without the aid of beams or elaborate wooden supports. Surely a feat of engineering, if I'm not mistaken, that people did not believe possible these days and was probably equally unknown and unimaginable among the ancients. So Alberti praises brunelleschi for his engineering feat and for his outdoing of antiquity. He also makes the hyperbolic assertion that the cupula is so large that it could cover the whole of Tuscany with its shadow. Now this striking phrase has been much interpreted and particular attention should be drawn to Jan Tso's Maxim in the Dela familia. That if a family cannot all live under the single, under a single roof, they should try nonetheless all to live under a single, a single will. something that when scaled up to the city as a whole evokes an all-encompassing form of social cohesion among the many resonances of the shadow. In the letter to Brunelleschi, however, there is one that has only been commented on so far as I know by Mary Pardo, building on some suggestions in an essay by Gili o Carlo Argan, and that is that it is a rather pictorial or even painterly idea. Alberti himself makes a connection between shadows and paintings. At the start of the second book of the day, Pura, where he says, quintillion believed that the earliest painters used to draw around shadows made by the sun. And the art eventually grew by a process of additions. And indeed it must be recognized that whatever else the shadow signifies for Alberti, and I'm happy to talk more about that in the discussion if people are interested. it does seem to speak to the motion that Bruno's achievement in part consists in his ability through the construction of this building to project an image over the entire surrounding area. In this sense, there is perhaps an implication in this letter that serves as an introduction to the treaties that Brunelleschi has forged his own historian on the grand scale of the city itself, that he has been able to reorganize it according to his own masterful gaze and. If that sounds farfetched and I can see how it could, then we should remember that Brunelleschi is alleged to have invented perspective and to have demonstrated it precisely by making pictures of the Urban Center of Florence Pictures that mixed painted representations with reflected images and with real views of the sky. Later on, he would be cast as the protagonist of the Tale of the Grasso Le Wallo. That is the story of the Fat Woodworker. this is a novella which tells the story of a beha or practical joke in which Brunelleschi persuades the entire city to collude in a conspiracy, um, to make the woodworker manto believe that he is really a different person called Matt Thao. So Brunelleschi thus appears as a man whose formidable in general, that's his intelligence or brilliance. And his mastery of illusionism allowed him to make a representation that involved the whole Florentine population, one that was so successful, that he was ultimately able to persuade a man that he was not who he thought he was, and that he had always had another identity entirely. As Marvin Trachtenberg has pointed out, one of the things that Bruno's chief biographers Antonio Manti and Giorgio Vasari seem to have been most interested in is the way in which a young, largely untried architect, somehow managed, essentially through charisma and rhetorical prowess in their telling to take control of the city's main building project. Perhaps Alberti too recognized Bruno, les's ability to seize the narrative as it were, and to make a Florence a histor of his own. So in that sense, the cup might have stood for Alberti as an extraordinary act of the making of meaning, a means of bringing order to the world and infusing it with intentionality. Such an idea is supported by some of Alberta's other activities. These include his staging of a vernacular poetry contest beneath the dome in 1441. This was called the Corona, or the Contest for the Crown, where basically, uh, humanists, presented poems, which were sort of Latinate in their form, but translated. Um, but they were written in the vernacular instead in Tuscan. We might also think of his dialogue, the Profu Abna. I, you can sort of rough loosely translate that as, um, the dialogue on avoiding mental anguish. It's basically how to deal with, uh, anxiety and depression in the Renaissance, which he pen a few years later in the 1440s. And there pretty much all of the discussion is set in and around the cathedral. And the character specifically praised the building, perhaps in the letter to Brunelleschi, where he celebrates his return from exile. Perhaps that letter is animated then by a sense of having reached a kind of center or anchor of meaning, right? Coming from the periphery of all those circles to which the Alberta were pushed out back to the center. If exile was in a way, a colossal unmaking of meaning, a prolonged attack on a person's identity, through innumerable acts of alienation, removing them from their social networks, disrupting their fundamental relationships with places at the Cupula, Alberti might have encountered the very opposite. Now we've seen how in the Dela familia John, uh, Jan, using language that is evocative of pictorial and perspectival practice, set out how one might achieve meaning, or at least order by placing oneself at the center of a structured domestic sphere. But his spider simile is undeniably sinister. Alberta's positing of the cup pillar, as I have characterized it as a meaningful center of urban and civic world, is far more positive, and yet, as some observers have remarked, his letter to Brunelleschi is not without ambivalence, A shadow can be menacing and giants to which he compares The great geniuses of Florence were widely associated with physical and moral danger. Moreover, in claiming that the shadow of the cupula fell not only over Florence, but over the whole of Tuscany, Alberti seems to acknowledge the expansionist territorial ambitions of a city that commanded large Swedes of territory and that had already subdued other cities, including Rezo, Pistoia, and Pisa, bringing them under Florentine domination. This dome that was so often referred to as a vast macina kind of machine, in other words, was also part of the enormous machinery of the state. An outstanding demonstration of the Republic's administrative capabilities, and its command of resources and skills. A religious building, it might be, but as the Florentine architect re they would later put it, the cathedral is common and public because it is constructed communally with the money of all. And indeed the cathedral and its cupula were public works that had often shared the same workforce as the government palace, the palazzo publico. Now, both of these buildings had been planned at the end of the 13th century and both formed part of a great architectural program that expressed and instantiated the ideology of the states. Indeed the government palace rather than the cathedral, could itself sometimes serve as the figurative center of the city in his jeric to the city of Florence. So that's a great praise of the city. Leonardo Bruni, another humanist scholar who for some years served as the chancellor of Florence, had described the entire Florentine territory as a series of concentric rings. And what he said was just as on a round buckler. So a butler is a shield. A kind of small shield. I'm just showing you one day. You can see it's a sort of set of concentric circles. Just as on a round buckler where one ring is laid around the other. The innermost ring loses itself in the central knob that is the middle of the, of the entire Buckler. So here we see the regions lying like rings surrounding an enclosing one another within them. Florence is first similar to the central knob, the center of the whole orbit. The city itself is run by walls and suburbs, and around the suburbs in turn lies a ring of country houses. And around them, the circle of towns, the whole outermost region is enclosed in a still larger orbit and circle. So this movement from the inside out is then accompanied in the same text by an opposite one that moves from the outside in. As Bruni sets out a hierarchy of beauty and magnificence arguing that the villas are more beautiful than the distant panorama. The suburbs more handsome than the villas and the city itself more beautiful than its suburbs. And at the innermost point of this hierarchical scheme, he places the government palace to be sure in the center of the city, there is a tall and handsome palace of great beauty and remarkable workmanship. This fine building bespeak by its very appearance, the purpose for which it was constructed just as in a large fleet. It is an easy manner, uh, matter to pick out the flagship that carries the admiral, who is the leader and head over the other captains and their ships. So in Florence, everyone immediately recognizes that this palace is so immense that it must house the men who are appointed to govern the state. Indeed, it was so magnificently conceived and loomed so toweringly that it dominates all the buildings nearby and its top stands out above those of the private houses. Indeed, I do not think that I ought to call this building simply a fortress, but rather the fortress of the fortress. So this description of the palace as a fortress is certainly fitting. It is a huge rugged structure with great ated battlements at 90 meters it's opposing, imposing tower reaches almost three times the height permitted for private towers, emphasizing the supremacy of the republic and seeming to aspire to that monopoly of the use of violence that Max Weber would centris later characterize as a defining feature of the modern state. Some of you might have been there and been up the tower. You can go up, uh, and you have amazing views over the whole city at the same time, the palace seeks to present a refined and beautiful appearance in front of it. A large L-shaped piazza allows for excellent views of the building's. Two well-ordered facades, while also providing a place for political assembly and spectacle. Now if Bruni admired the palace as an exemplary uh, expression of state power, Alberti seems to have taken the opposite view for the very same reasons in a pointed incident at the start of the second book of the Profu Euro. That's that dialogue again on avoiding mental anguish. The messenger arrives requesting that the main speaker, the wise retired elder statesman, Ann Pendel Feeney, should go Sue Ingio up to the government palace in order to advise on matters of state. Now, ALO is very patriotic, but he declines because she says it's pointless. The officials in the palace don't really want to hear what he has to say. As an older man of experience who has held political office and headed a large household, and some similar similarities to Jan Osso, the charismatic spider patriarch of the Della Familia, and this is a comparison that Alberti himself makes in the dialogue. And gen. So two, at his first appearance in the Dela Familia explains that he's weary since he had to get up at first light and go to the government palace to intervene on behalf of a friend. Uh, perhaps referring to the Palazzo Deja in Padua where the dialogue takes place, or the Palazzo dle in Venice where he lived during the exile. So both Ann and Jan Sso then are familiar with the halls of power, even if they go there only out of necessity. Jan Sso, in fact, has much to say when it comes to government and actually the real person on whom he's based. Jan the Tomaso Alberte was the only one of the family to enjoy true political success after the return to Florence, since he attained one of the three highest offices of the state, uh, when he became re de in 1436. Now, undoubtedly in the Dela Familia Genau is proud. Of the Alberti history of political participation. And he reminds the other speakers that a member of the Klan had been a prior, at the time when the foundations of what he calls our government palace were laid. That event had taken place in 1299 and for the next nearly 90 years, the building would play an important role in the Albe lives. Indeed, gen also says proudly that Meer Beto, that's, Benedetto Ro Leon Batista's grandfather and Meer Lyle, another prominent family member, was so involved in affairs of state that they were, she says, always at the palace and yet Genot so is markedly negative about political participation. Think I missed a slide there. Okay. Um, nothing he tells Leonardo is less worthy of being considered an honor than taking part in the government. On one hand, after decades of banishment, we alberti, he says, are now above such vanity. On the other hand, governance is anyway a bothersome business that ultimately bring one, brings one nothing but hatred and suspicion. So like annual Lord Pendel Feeney, then he's unenthusiastic about politics and like annual law, he expresses a preference for a quiet private life. Preferably one lived out in the country away from the endless noise of the city. Indeed. For Jano, the city is nothing but a theater of contention. And the government palace is the epicenter of urban strife. A country villa, he tells Leonardo allows one to flee what he calls the uproar, the tumults, and the tempest of the city of the Piazza and of the government palace. A sequence, this terra Piazza paggio that represents a progressive narrowing of focus and also a hierarchy of turpitude, implying a complete inversion, at least in moral terms of Leonardo Bruni's territorial order. If we remember for bruni, the Pakistan at the apex of all that's good for janot. So by contrast, the city is worse than the country. Its outdoor. Public spaces are worse than the city as a whole, and the government palace is the worst of all. So Janot so thus favors a private life in which he can mind his own business and stay out of the public eye. More than that, in fact, he tells the younger Alberti that one must never neglect one's own affairs for those of the republic, except in circumstances where honor demands it. And he urges that in the final analysis, one must live for oneself, not for everyone else. Si vire say non Alcon. Now these positions, which echo aspects of Epicurean philosophy were certainly not shared by all indeed, they run directly contrary to expressions of militant Republican further that are recorded as having been made in the 15th century, um, by figures such as, uh, Al Dol Jan Phili, who declared in a government council that our city is more important than our children. so, uh, Zi is someone who won big in the power struggles in which the Alberti lost in. So, you know, we can understand why, he would be enthusiastic. and, um, and Jan, not so, not so much, but perhaps the apogee of Janot so's polemic Against Politics comes in a highly wrought passage in which he says, you are men worthy of hatred if you take pleasure in the perversity and sorrow, which go together with public office and administration. Unless cruel and Bastille by nature, what joy can one feel when he must continually listen to the complaints? Laments and sobs of orphans, widows, and unfortunate wretches. What pleasure can one feel when all day long? He must welcome hoards. Of course, men swindler, spy slanderous thieves and scandal mongers, but must guard himself against them at the same time. What peace can one have who every night must twist? Men's limbs, hear pain, wracked voices cry out for mercy and yet must persist in horrible cruelties and must be the butcher and manor of human, human limbs. How are vulnerable to think of it? It is something that must be avoided at all costs. So the evocation of torture as a routine political practice stands out very strongly here. it does so of course, first and foremost because of the abhorrence of the imagery that it evokes, but the language is also striking. In particular, the double incidence of the word limbs. Mera in Alberta's Tuscan in a single sentence constitutes an unusual repetition and perhaps indicates a particularly heightened effect. On the one hand, there is of course a sense here of the destruction of the body politic, right, the mangling of the body. On the other hand, though, I think that it is useful to remind ourselves again that book three of the Della Familia and the first version of the De Pura are essentially contemporary texts. That is to say that at the very same time that Alberti was writing about the mangling of Mera body parts as part of the exercise of power, he was also constructing a theory of pictorial meaning in which the assemblage of meres body parts to make a body, the process he calls composition was the single most important procedure. Thus, if the construction of the cupula could be seen as I have argued as a pictorial act, an exemplary act of meaning making that transformed the city itself into a giant historian, the workings of politics might be considered its opposite. That is to say decomposition, the reversal and disaggregation of pictorial composition, which implies also the destruction and distortion of moral clarity, meaning, and order. Now, back in 1387, the very first punishment to which the Alberti family had been subjected was the banning of Be and Rio Dicho from entering the government palace. The decree that mandated their exile states specifically that it was made in palatium, that is to say in the palace, and every subsequent restriction on the family came from the same source, perhaps then it makes a certain sense that when he returned, so to speak, not really a return.'cause Alberti was born outside of Florence, but he, uh, presented as a return when he returned to Florence. Alberti could feel largely positive, even enthused about the enormous tubular, but he suspected that the palace produced a little more than discordant fragments or even to use the Latin term. okay. So just a very quick, coder and I'll try to summarize in a few brief remarks. so one thing that I've become increasingly convinced of in my studies of Alberti is that his intellectual positions are intimately linked with his feminists historical connections to the city of Florence. First as dominant plutocrats, uh, and political operators, and then as exiles. and by the way, it's interesting. I had a great visit, to the, uh, library today and, uh, saw some of the rare books including this very, fine first edition, 1485 edition of Albert's Architectural Treaties, the de rto, which Jennifer Parker very, uh, generously showed to me. And, it just goes to show that it's always worth just leaving through a book when you see it there, because I opened it up and immediately what I saw is that in the preface that Angelo, uh, ano, the humanist scholar wrote for this edition, it's a kind of dedi rededication to Lorenzo The Medici, the first thing he says is that this is, you know, this book is by Alberti from the Great Alberti family, right? It's the first thing he says. So he, he makes that link to the family straight away. The 14th century was an immensely turbulent period in which Florentine struggled to maintain a functioning form of participatory Republican government. In doing so, they faced crises that pushed their system to its limits and sometimes beyond. So they had to cons contend with the dissent into factionalism with a habit of powerful individuals ruthlessly to pursue private interest over the common good with the constant threat, and sometimes the actuality of collapse into tyranny and despotic rule. And with the problem of runaway wealth, some citizens like the Alberti, just simply became so rich and amassed so much power, thereby that their very existence was a threat to the social cohesion, and communal life of the city. Now, Alberta's family had been at the heart of these struggles as both winners and then losers. And the problems of the 14th century remained a constant motivating factor behind his thinking, not just his thinking about society as a whole, but also about architecture. Specifically. Marvin Trachtenberg has argued that it was when he witnessed the completion of the Dome of Florence Cathedral, uh, and wrote his letter to Brunelleschi, that Alberti first began seriously to engage with architecture. I have suggested that his engagement with Florence's monumental buildings was powerfully inflected by his ambivalence regarding the Florentine state and ambivalence that allowed him to speak in positive terms about the duomo, while remaining markedly negative regarding the government Palace and I have further argued that these initial thoughts about architecture were mediated by a sort of pictorial thinking that he simultaneously developed in the day Pictor. As part of this, I've wanted to show how Alberti sometimes thinks about architecture in fascinating ways, even in his non architectural writings. So it's important that we as architectural historians read those too, as it happens. When Alberti turned his hand to architecture itself in later life, he ended up being primarily a maker of facades. Producing works full of eclectic references that appear deliberately to exacerbate the tensions between the building as tectonic structure and the building as image. On one level, it seems he was always trying to corral disparate parts into a perfectly ordered picture. Thank you very much.

1 49:47

let me start here with opening question. Um. It's so fascinating to thank you so much for a brilliant, intricately woven talk, uh, that guides us through, UTIs, various writings, but also his personal history, family history. very excited to see also one of his buildings here. In your presentation, I was thinking also about verti, cathedral in matcha, right. And how that project might fit into this construction of history making and, and paint this pictorial act.

3 50:23

Yeah. Uh,

1 50:23

pictorial meaning making, especially in comparison to Brunelleschi Cupola.

3 50:29

Um, if you

1 50:30

have any thoughts about how he's contrasting himself to Brunelleschi in that process.

2 50:35

Yeah. so Albe, designed two buildings in Mantua. They had a very, strange fortune because one of them was a church, San Sebastiano. And, it was really his big chance because it, he, the, you know, the building was being built from scratch, the whole thing. but it went wrong in various ways. And the money ran out and the patron got distracted and it was never finished. And then it was messed around with a lot. So we don't really know exactly, um, what it was going to look like. and the other one, which I, you are referring to is the, um, church of San Andrea, which we know that Alberti. so he, he writes to, um. the, uh, Marquis of Manchu are saying, you know, here you are, you are gonna rebuild Santa Andrea, and there's a design and it's good, but I've got a much better design. I'm gonna make you a drawing, I'm gonna send it to you. And it seems that it went ahead. but, Alberti was dead by the time they even broke the ground, right? So how much he is an author of that building is, um, is, is difficult to say, but some of you might have been there and seen it. and it is a pretty, it's a very interesting building. I mean, certainly in terms of the idea of the building as image. and then, you know, as image tectonics kind of relationship because, the facade is really like a sort of separate building almost, uh, on the front of it. And all of the orders, you can see that, here, on the temporal malano. You've got these big engaged columns, um, at San Andrea. They are sters and they're really just kind of little, they're just tracings. It's almost like they've been drawn on. Right. And the, the whole facade was originally painted. so I feel like his final work, um, you, yeah, it almost, the facade almost does become an image basically at that point. and yet on the interior, it's really the most sort of, um, volumetric you could say, building that Al Betty, that Al Betty comes up with, um, because it has a huge barrel vault and you know, these, these, big vaulted chapels as well in terms of the differences with brunelleschi. Hmm. That's interesting to think about. I mean, certainly there are differences regarding, um, a. the tempo Malano, I guess because he did plan a dome for it, and he wanted the dome not to be the, pointed acute fifth. That bruski, I mean, Bruski didn't design it, it designed many years before, but, was building, um, in Florence, but rather a kind of, um, a semis sphere, you know, like the Pantheon. yeah. So, but I mean, the question of Alberta's relationship with Brunelleschi is a very vexed and difficult one, and we just don't know what their relationship was at all, because all we have is one letter from Alberti to Brunelleschi. So, you know, Brunelleschi might have just read down Moon, like, who are you? Uh, and put it aside. Or he might have said, oh, my great friend, Alberti, this is fantastic. Let's talk. We, we just don't know.

1 53:38

Thank you. yes. Uh, come up with a mic, Rachel.

4 53:52

thank you so much. Thank you so much for this talk. and I hate to say that I'm not an architectural historian. I'm gonna seize on what Yoko mentioned in her intro view as a historian of ideas, engaging with the history of ideas, um, because I was really enjoying this talk and super following everything along. And suddenly you had a fleeting remark on a slide about a passage from Alberti where he's quoting Quintilian.

3 54:19

Yeah.

4 54:19

And this idea of Quintilian believed that the earliest painters used to draw around shadows made by the sun. And this is sort of the, these are the earliest paintings. Mm. And I'm fascinated by this, and sort of the history of ideas around why I just, I have a horse in this race and I wanna kind of hear your thoughts about why is it that. People like quintillion. This was not a known passage to me, but it pliny similarly tells this story about the origin of the portrait. Yeah. Coming from a silhouette tracing, right. Yeah. Shadow. And then again, like the Quintilian says, you know, alberti, eventually the art grew as pieces, uh, yeah. You know, as additions. And so Yeah. Someone presses clay into this shadow silhouette. Right, right, right. To make the first portrait. And I'm wondering, what do you, could you speculate as to why you think shadow, right. This immaterial thing, fugitive, elusive, et cetera. Why is this being now in multiple stories, the sort of or material of art?

2 55:29

Yeah. Yeah. Thank, thank you. No, that's a, that's, um, that's a great question. And if I remember rightly about the plin. Passage. It's more political, right? Because it's also to do with kind of absence and, yeah, and it's, and long and longing in a way. because, so ti has two origins of painting. and the first is narcissist. Um, right. So he, he says that narcissist who was converted into a flower. so there's also a kind of longing at the origin, at the origin of painting via a different story there for Albehi, but no, the shadow. Okay. So in, you know, Albee's very keen on quintillion, and he, you, he relies on quintillion at various points, in the treaties. And some have said in a way for the structure of the whole, the whole treaties, on painting. You know, I suppose the thing with the shadow is it's. It's just pure speculation. Right. But is that, it's just kind of like a first image, right? it's just the sort of primary image that is cast of oneself apart from a reflection. Right. Which is what narcissists sees. I mean, those are the kind of first images that they're made automatically. Right. You don't even have to, um, they're made without any kind of techno whatsoever. I mean, it, it feels like there should be a more profound answer than that, but

3 56:55

Yeah.

4 56:59

Working.

3 57:00

Yeah. Yeah.

2 57:07

Yeah. But no, it's really, it, it is really interesting and um, you, you know, actually when Alberti basically says that one of the things that painters can do is bring back the dead. Yeah, right. Which is also something that quintillion says about the ProAir that the orator does. So there's definitely that kind of, um, connection there. And I suppose, you know, alti is also very interested in friendship and he writes about that. And of course, you know, the topos of the friend is a sort of second self, nah. So whether the shadow is kind of a second self as well, whether there's some, I don't know, but it's, um, yeah, it's a great question

3 57:49

Michael.

5 57:52

Thanks again for your talk. I'm really interested in the, in the way you're reading these texts and um, and how much you get out of them. Um, and I'm wondering, especially about your identification of this pictorial mode of thinking, which I think is fascinating. Uh, and I guess my question about that is to what degree you see that as kind of an authorial idiosyncrasy on for Alberti? Yeah. Or is it part of a broader habit, of a, of a particular social group? Um, who Yeah. Tend to look at the world that way?

2 58:34

Well, that's a good question. So I think there's something very particular about Alberti that I think actually. a painting occupies this key role in his thinking, actually above architecture, above, in some ways above writing. And there's this very interesting passage in, uh, the MoMA, which is, it's a bit like a novel. I've actually wrote this novel basically in Latin. Which tells the story of the God of harsh criticism. It's very, it's, it's very sort of, um, satirical, but there's a, pardon in it where Caron, you know, the ferry man to the underworld is having a conversation with a dead philosopher and the philosopher's trying to do philosophy with him. And Karen's just like, this is all nonsense. You know, this is all just word play. And he says, I'm gonna tell you the truth about human beings. And I didn't hear it from a philosopher, I heard it from a painter. He says, all your philosophy is just word play. You know, painters looking at linear mentor lines and angles no more than all of you philosophers do when you are measuring the heavens, doing astronomy, you know, all of these things. So, and you know, maybe that's just a comic interlude, but I don't think so. Actually, I think that for Alberti painting was incredibly significant and, it was partly significant because it in some way was prior to and beyond language. And, you know, Alberti is so good at language, but of course, being so good at language, he's hyper aware of how slippery language is. He's hyper, aware of polys me language and how it can mean different things'cause he does it himself all the time. but he says this thing in his autobiography. So Alberti wrote his autobiography when he was in his thirties in the third person in Latin. So, um, something to look forward to when you get to your thirties if you haven't already. Something to plan for. and, he, he has these amazing remarks and he says, uh, you know, at one he says he loved, He loved the study of letters, which he considered to be like, fragrant blossoms. And yet at other times they would pile up under his eyes like scorpions so that he could do anything rather than continue to read. So he has this kind of odd relationship with language, but he's never negative about painting. And you know, he even says that when he was painting, just hours went by and he didn't realize, you know, all of that kind of stuff about flow and so on. I think that for Alberti, the thing about painting is that it's the perfect sort of fusion of, moral and mathematical reasoning. It's kind of moral philosophy because it's, it's an inquiry and it's a story. so he's thinking of his career right back at methodologically to meaning and inquiry, but also, it's mathematical. and it has that kind of mathematical precision that gets away from the ambiguity of language. So, Sorry, I was a slightly rambling answer, but, but I think painting is right at the heart for Alberti. He's, you know, he's, he's sometimes very negative about architecture. He satirizes architecture ruthlessly, uh, in the moments. So at the same time, Alberti is writing an architectural treatise. He's writing this novel where he's just like, you know, the architects are, uh, building things that are falling down and, it's kind of, you know, two different sides of the same coin, you know.

Alberti's Influence and Modern Relevance

1 1:01:54

maybe one last question here, Les. There's a hand in the audience line. could you, because we have a lot of students in the audience tonight who may be coming to Alberti for the first time. Could you say something about why Alberti is a figure that continues to matter today? Right. Why, why should students. Read him. What, what do you think In 2025, right?

3 1:02:25

Yeah.

1 1:02:26

Just sort of stepping back a a second. Yeah. Thinking about why young people might gain from engaging with this 15th century

2 1:02:36

figure. Yeah. Well, um, I'll bet you surprisingly modern as an author and he's modern in the way that he continually reflects on authorship, right. And even, where I was talking at the end there about this idea of dismemberment, right? I think what's one of the things that's really going on behind that is Alberti is always thinking about authorial identity, right? He's actually thinking about the kind of, when he is thinking about sort of dismemberment, the loss of meaning. It's really to do with somehow the destruction of the author. Alberti is very cagey, you know, he was exiled, but then of course he was allowed back in. He keeps going on about being an exile. even after, you know, he's no longer an exile. Well, partly he must have never felt that he really fitted back in, and he's quite clear about that. In other ways, it's a poetic stance. You know, he's, he's part of a tradition of authors who use exile as the idea of being an outsider. It's quite a modern, at least to us, it feels like a modern idea of authorship, right? That the author is kind of an outsider who has to stand alone, in some way. So Albert is sort of both wanting to be in the center and always outside on the periphery. uh, at the same time in terms of the kind of, subjects that he's talking about. You know, as I said at the end there, well, some of the things that are really concerning Alberti, how does one maintain a participatory government? Um, how does one preserve. What is the relationship of architecture to the state? Uh, what is the relationship of wealth to the state? I mean, these are all questions right, for us, today, no doubt. So, you know, I think he remains relevant in all sorts of ways. I mean, there's obviously lots of ways in which he's completely sort of, um, uh, seems completely archaic to us. He has some terrible views about some things, and if you read the treaties on the family, there's a whole section where Jan Oso explains, how one should treat one's wife. And it's just like, it's unbelievable appalling misogyny. So, you know, uh, Alberti is also very unmodern, in lots of ways and, uh, and has to be kind of handled robustly and certainly not just kind of, uh, certainly not, idealized. But there's also other ways in which, you know, he's a pretty extraordinary rider and quite, fun to read.

1 1:05:02

Richard. Okay. One last question. Yeah. And then we'll call it a name.

6 1:05:08

Thank you very much for this, uh, fascinating talk. I'm trying to remember who the author was. I want to say it was John. Hmm. Um, who may have suggested that, one of the things we owe to Verti is that he basically elevated architecture to the status of a Yeah. A legitimate profession.

2 1:05:30

Yeah.

6 1:05:31

Uh, whereas previously it was the realm of the traveling kind of, uh, builder.

2 1:05:36

Yeah.

6 1:05:37

And he did that by pulling out of Vitruvius, especially this, um, you know, the, the idea of sacred number and proportion.

3 1:05:47

Yeah.

6 1:05:47

And comparing it to music, with its kind of numerical kind of, uh, basis. And I'm just wondering what you, in, in that sense, in doing that he, he basically makes he legitimizes architecture as a profession for the first time. Yes. I'm wondering what you think about that and, whether that's

2 1:06:05

yeah. Well, it's a, it's an interesting subject because that is indeed, um, what people have said that alberti in a way, invents the modern, idea of the architects. You know, right at the beginning of his treatise, he says he, I consider architects who through, you know, the ingenious moving of weights and doing this and that, is able to build these things. And he talks about all the elevated disciplines that architects have to know. So he, you know, the architects has to be an expert in the liberal arts and all of these things. ironically, that has in more re in more recent years. That's become, something that people point to, to really say that Alberti is a problem, right? Because they say, well, in the Middle Ages there was this really much more organic sense of how you made a building. And Alberti, who's a writer, comes along and turns it into authorship. where, you know, uh, building a medieval cathedral, while all sorts of people were involved, there wasn't a, a complete plan beforehand. They used time. you know, this is Berg's argument. and then Berti comes along who's a writer, and says, you have to plan everything to every detail before you start, and then do it as quickly as possible so no one can change it. and it's your design, right? So he, he kind of makes it authorial. Um, so, so it's kind of used against Alberti. At the same time, the definition is also used against alberti in another way, often by the same people who say, and you know what, Alberti wasn't even an architect'cause he wasn't an architect according to what we think of now as a professionalized architect, because he was actually a writer, he was a ante. So, um, so I think it's right what you're saying, uh, and the effect on, how he's been perceived in historiography is, uh, is quite interesting. Often opposite to what we might assume.

1 1:07:52

Okay. Thank you very much. Please join me in thanking the speaker.