Cultural Judo

Late in the​ 1460s, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a book on ciphers. It was a dialogue between him and a longtime friend, Leonardo Dati, who had recently been made head of the papal secretariat. Like many of Alberti’s writings, On Composing Ciphers was highly original: the first European text to propose a polyalphabetic cipher, which used coding wheels, and to explain the principles of cryptanalysis, which his cipher was designed to baffle. Near the start, Alberti set the scene. He and Dati had conversed, as two elderly literary gentlemen should, in a locus amoenus, the ‘great papal gardens’. They hit on a subject that might have seemed incongruous with the flowerbeds, but which filled them with enthusiasm: ‘the German inventor’, Johannes Gutenberg, who had created a new way of impressing letters on paper. With his press, three men could produce two hundred copies of a single book in three months – far faster than the speediest professional scribe. From that they moved, through an elegant transition, to ciphers – also a system for moving messages from one form to another by proper choice and placement of letters.

Many observers would praise – and many critics would denounce – the speed with which the presses produced books. But Alberti, who took a special interest in new technologies, noted one feature of the machine in particular. ‘With a single impression’, he explained, the press ‘fills a whole page of large format paper with writing’. He was describing the large, inky sheets that emerged from the press, each one containing two pages or more of text on each side (two for a folio). These were hung up to dry and then folded, gathered and bound – one of the more prominent ways in which printing differed from scribal book production. Perhaps Alberti visited a printing shop and saw the pressmen at work. Dati certainly did. As Martin Davies pointed out long ago, the Bibliothèque nationale de France owns a copy of Augustine’s City of God, printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz in Subiaco in 1467. Dati bought it, as he recorded in the book, ‘from the Germans themselves, living in Rome, who are accustomed not to writing but “printing” books of this sort without number’. It is hard not to imagine the two men inspecting Dati’s purchase as they chatted in the papal garden.

Alberti, as Martin McLaughlin makes clear, was an intellectual of a new kind. An illegitimate member of a great Florentine family, he was born in 1404, and grew up in exile and without means. But he studied the humanities, just coming into fashion in Italy, at the innovative school of Gasparino Barzizza. Before he finished learning the law, he began his career as a writer, producing a Latin comedy that he put into circulation as if it were a previously unknown classical text. He also began to study mathematics, as a form of relaxation. Alberti would pursue the study of both the classics and technical subjects, often together, throughout his life.

He started out as a cleric in minor orders, working in the papal curia in Rome. Many other erudite, hungry clerics haunted Italian cities and courts, looking for patronage. Alberti, however, soon attracted attention as a dazzlingly original writer, in both Italian and Latin. His works, which ranged from a comic mock-encomium to the fly to dialogues and treatises on many subjects, broke new literary and intellectual ground. Soon his interests expanded to encompass the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, all of which were developing rapidly. He not only described the works of contemporary artists but also produced some of his own. In the 1430s, artists at Ferrara began making medals that looked like outsize ancient coins, with portraits of the good and the great on their obverses. Alberti appeared on the medals of Matteo de’ Pasti and also crafted his own self-portrait on a bronze plaquette. By mid-century he had become a prominent antiquarian and architect, who counselled and worked for Giovanni Rucellai, head of a great Florentine clan, as well as the rulers of Ferrara, Rimini and other cities. And he never stopped writing on new subjects and in new genres. Even after his death in 1472, his works engaged the most discriminating readers. Lorenzo de’ Medici, while relaxing at the baths, had his secretary write to the printer who was producing the posthumous first edition of On the Art of Building. The secretary asked that each gathering of the book be sent to him as soon as it was complete so that he could go on reading them to Lorenzo without having to wait for publication.

In the 19th century, Alberti’s autobiography caught the sharp eye of Jacob Burckhardt, with its vivid portrait of Alberti as an athlete, artist and courtier who could jump over the head of a man standing next to him and who made walking, riding and talking into arts in their own right. Generations of readers first encountered Alberti in Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). There he figured as a ‘universal human being’ typical of his time. Burckhardt did not describe Alberti’s writings in much detail. Nonetheless, his treatises on the arts and on the Florentine family began to win the attention of scholars by the end of the 19th century. More recently, his great treatise on architecture, his literary satires and his dialogues on moral philosophy have appeared in good editions and translations. McLaughlin has set out to show what sort of writer Alberti was, and the results are impressive – more so, in the end, than Burckhardt’s brilliant impressionism.

Not long after Alberti arrived in Florence, he composed a treatise, On Painting, in both Italian and Latin versions. For centuries controversy raged about which was the original, but Luca Boschetto and others have shown that the Italian came first. Though Alberti was new both to the city and to writing in Italian, he prefaced his book with a dedicatory letter to the great architect Filippo Brunelleschi, a compressed and eloquent text that exemplifies his practices and powers as a writer:

I used both to marvel and to regret that so many excellent and divine arts and sciences, which we know from their works and from historical accounts were possessed in great abundance by the talented men of antiquity, have now disappeared and are almost entirely lost. Painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, geometers, orators, augurs and similar distinguished and remarkable intellects are very rarely to be found these days, and are of little merit. Consequently I believed what I heard many say, that Nature, mistress of all things, had grown old and weary, and was no longer producing geniuses any more than giants on a vast and wonderful scale such as she did in what one might call her youthful and more glorious days. Since then, I have been brought back here – from the long exile in which we Albertis have grown old – into this our city, adorned above all others. I have come to understand that in many men, but especially in you, Filippo, and in our close friend Donato the sculptor and in others like Nencio, Luca and Masaccio, there is a genius for [accomplishing] every praiseworthy thing. For this they should not be slighted in favour of anyone famous in antiquity in these arts.

The letter touched on some traditional issues, especially when Alberti described his earlier belief that the world had grown old and creativity had become extinct. He and Petrarch, who was the most influential of the 14th-century humanists, may both have found the same classical precedents for this view, in Columella’s book on agriculture or the younger Pliny’s letters. But Alberti drew on a wider range of classical sources. Christine Smith has argued that Lucretius, whom Petrarch never read, helped inspire Alberti’s dismay at the lack of giants in his world. In his odd-sounding reference to the disappearance of augurs, he alluded, as McLaughlin crisply demonstrates, to the works in which Cicero, an augur himself, had lamented the death of Hortensius and others who were both augurs and orators. This is only one of the Albertian puzzles that have baffled many others, me included, and which McLaughlin solves.

The letter, then, was a mosaic, resplendent with bright stones taken from elsewhere – a metaphor that Alberti himself used for his writing. But it was also a manifesto. Most humanists, like Alberti, believed that they could achieve competence in Latin only by imitating ancient models. But endless imitation could prove deeply depressing, as he made clear. As always, Alberti took account of his experience as well as his reading. The conditions of his early life, which he described with evocative brevity as ‘the long exile in which we Albertis have grown old’, had deepened his melancholy. But fresh experiences dispelled it. Alberti’s encounter with the new visual arts in Florence transformed him, as he told it, revealing that due respect for ancient models need not provoke despair nor foil efforts at innovation. As McLaughlin writes, Alberti’s ‘sense of modern superiority is not simply a rhetorical topos appropriate to introductory letters or prologues’. He developed the point more than once in On Painting. In it he pointed out that the ancients had not grasped the principles of perspective – which Brunelleschi had devised, and Masaccio had applied, with an ingenuity that remains dazzling – and that he was not writing a history of painting, as the elder Pliny had, but ‘making an art of painting afresh’. In one short letter Alberti set out much, though certainly not all, of the agenda for his life’s work: the fashioning of an eclectic but disciplined classicism, tightly related to ancient models but never simply dependent on them, in both writing and the visual arts.

The core of this book is an extended inquiry, text by text, into the way Alberti fulfilled his plans, and the way they grew and changed over time. McLaughlin works from the texts, in a pleasingly precise, exacting way. As he interprets them he engages with the whole tradition of Albertian scholarship, from the classical articles that formed part of the revival of Italian humanistic scholarship after the Second World War to the tidal wave of critical editions, exhibition catalogues and monographs, many of them inspired by the fifth centenary of Alberti’s birth, that has washed into libraries since 2000 (McLaughlin himself produced a fine bilingual edition of Alberti’s biographical and autobiographical works last year, in the I Tatti Renaissance Library series). Gradually the reader comes to understand how Alberti pulled off his astonishing feat of cultural judo. He based even the most forward-looking of his books on a foundation of classical learning, which he never ceased to deepen and expand.

Alberti the writer, first and last, was Alberti the reader, whose attitude towards ancient (and later) texts was anything but passive. He grew up in an age of textual discoveries – the hunting and gathering decades of Italian humanism, when Poggio Bracciolini and others ransacked monastic libraries for texts they had read about but not yet seen. They ‘rediscovered’ Tacitus and Lucretius, the complete text of Cicero’s On the Orator and Quintilian’s The Education of the Orator, and many other soon-to-be canonical works. That is, they took them, by hook or by crook, from the monasteries that had preserved them for centuries, copied them or had them copied, and put them back into circulation, sometimes after hoarding them for a few decades, and more than once after losing the original.

Alberti did not hunt manuscripts himself, and not many books from his library have been identified. But he worked intensively to master every new Latin text as soon as he gained access to it, and he systematically exploited what he read. His hunger for usable sources never slackened. He was still mastering the Latin corpus when Greek texts became accessible, and the impact of the new world they opened up to him soon became clear, at least to informed readers who could decode his often oblique allusions. References to and translated passages from great Greek texts began to dot his works in Italian as well as Latin: a summary of the Odyssey, a long passage from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, tales from the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. Sometimes he found Greek materials in secondary sources or read them in translation. By the end of his life, however, as he collected the masses of material that fill On the Art of Building, he was a true polymath. The most learned humanist of the later 15th century, Angelo Poliziano, wrote a preface for the posthumous first edition of this book. In it, he praised Alberti’s immense mastery of ‘recondite’ subjects, deliberately choosing one of Alberti’s favourite terms.

Alberti did more than turn ancient (and medieval) literature into a quarry for quotations and allusions. He studied texts intensively and used them ingeniously – cultural judo again – in ways their authors could never have dreamed of. No text mattered more to him than Cicero’s Brutus, a history of Roman oratory in dialogue form. Alberti’s copy of the work survives, with other Ciceronian texts from his library, in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It’s possible that he copied them and likely that he decorated their margins with the pointing hands and the summaries in elegant script that call attention to key passages. And it’s certain that he took the messages of Cicero’s book to heart. The Brutus taught him a vast amount about Roman rhetoric. It inspired him to claim that he had adopted an ‘Attic’ style, more casual and more inclined to brevity than Cicero’s own (this claim, like many such, was exaggerated). It suggested to him that fine prose could be witty. Above all, it taught him to see that literature and the other arts had not been uniformly excellent, even in Greece or Rome. They had a history, as men shaped and reshaped them over time. ‘There is not one of [the arts],’ Cicero told his friends Brutus and Atticus, ‘which was invented and perfected at the same time.’

The authority of the ancients proved essential to asserting the legitimacy of the modern. When Alberti introduced to his Italian writings new genres, such as the formal philosophical dialogue, or new features, such as verse translations from Roman poets, he was doing his best to perfect a still flexible language and literature. In 1441, he held a literary contest in Florence, the Certame coronario. The learned judges disagreed in their evaluation of the submitted poems and refused to award the silver crown to any of the contestants. Alberti wrote a formal protest, in which he argued, drawing on Cicero, that the judges had brought the wrong expectations to their task. They should have used standards appropriate to a literature still in the process of formation. Most people thought that the competition had failed. But this was only a blip in Alberti’s long-running campaign for the vernacular, which inspired one of his most original works, the first formal grammar of Italian, and sparked the renewed cultivation of the vernacular a few decades later in Lorenzo’s Florence, when several of the submitted poems found places in an influential anthology.

Many – perhaps most – of Alberti’s most original works, from his four dialogues on the family to his treatments of the arts and architecture, reflected his desire, inspired in part by Cicero, to improve both Italian and Latin. His architectural works, such as the Malatesta Temple in Rimini, for which he used a triumphal arch as the façade and designed a classical dome, and the Sepulchre of Christ in San Pancrazio in Florence, for which he devised a new form of Roman inscriptional capitals, reveal a similar ability to assemble ancient components into new forms. In all cases, he had very practical reasons for making history: he sought to improve the literature of his time, but also to raise the status of the artists and architects whose complex arts he explored in his works. These were aimed less at the practitioners themselves than at the rulers and city patricians who hired them for large commissions – and, not less, at their learned advisers, who could explicate his impressive but demanding writing to their masters and mistresses.

Sometimes Alberti may have deliberately tweaked the noses of the ancients whom he admired so much. As Arielle Saiber and others have shown, scripts fascinated him at least as much as print. He examined ancient Roman inscriptions with great care and designed a number of new ones. One of these, on the façade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, commemorates his patron Giovanni Rucellai. Though handsome, it is notorious for what seems to be a technical error. Alberti had Rucellai’s Latin name, Johannes, carved with only one n. A mark above the letter indicated that a second one should be understood. Fifteenth-century scribes used this sort of suspension regularly, to shorten their labours, but Roman stonecutters had not. Yet Alberti may not simply have blundered. He used the same abbreviation for a double letter elsewhere: in the porphyry slab that marked the entryway to the church; in an inscription for his Holy Sepulchre in San Pancrazio; and in the commemorative inscription behind the original Trevi fountain, which he engineered for Pope Nicholas V. Alberti always liked practical solutions: did he prefer a functional and varied form of lettering to the uniformity of the classical models?

McLaughlin sharpens the point of his investigations by narrowing their base. He could have shed another kind of light on Alberti’s experiments with Latin by comparing them with those of his close contemporary Lorenzo Valla, who in his Life of Ferdinand of Aragon also found himself compelled to use modern terms for such things as the compass, the clock and the cannon. He could have shed another kind of light on Alberti’s experiments with Italian by comparing them with those of his friend and associate Dati. And he could have looked a little more closely at one of Alberti’s tics, to which he calls attention more than once: his habit of asking the dedicatees of his books to go over them and correct any flaws or errors that they detect. Such passages may have been commonplace efforts to feign modesty, rather like the thanks to colleagues that fill modern prefaces. But a fair amount of evidence shows that this sort of collaborative correction was, if not a common, at least an established practice. The Florentine collector and curmudgeon Niccolò Niccoli believed that most modern writing belonged in the outhouse rather than in his library. But he advised his friend Poggio Bracciolini in detail on the first version of his dialogues On Avarice. Poggio complied with Niccoli’s sharp criticisms and revised his work, complaining all the way, like a sensitive, but also sensible, graduate student with a sharp-eyed supervisor.

Did Alberti, a man of Luciferian pride, actually follow his friends’ advice? One piece of evidence, published in the 18th century and long known but not often discussed, suggests that he sometimes did. In June 1443, Dati and a young poet, Tommaso Ceffi, wrote to Alberti that, as he had requested, they were going over the text of his dialogues On the Family. They explained that they had corrected a good many scribal slips. But they also noted two of what they described, as diplomatically as they could, as ‘your errors, if we may speak between ourselves’. They found Alberti’s Italian style rough and pompous, especially towards the beginning of his work – qualities that neither ‘the Florentine language nor the critical judgment of uneducated men’ could normally accept. But they let these failings pass, since his language soon became ‘sweeter, and of the sort that fills the ears’.

His other error they found more serious. Again and again, Alberti cited a quotation or an example but failed to name his source. Instead he left a gap, ‘as if you either don’t know, or are inventing something yourself’. Cicero, by contrast, had devised a much more effective way of dealing with this problem: ‘He cites the words in such a way that he seems not to omit the names out of carelessness or ignorance, but as if he does not want to reopen a point that is known to all, so that he may free his readers of this tedium.’ They promised to fix this ‘fault’ if Alberti agreed. Alberti, as McLaughlin shows, often took special care when he introduced quotations. He regularly used the formula ut aiunt (‘as they say’) when quoting Cicero himself. I don’t know whether Dati and Ceffi persuaded Alberti to mend his citational ways. But they certainly gained a detailed understanding of his authorial practices. Alberti himself, moreover, believed from early on that criticism should play a central role in all the arts. In On Painting he argued that painters should solicit and consider critiques from as many and as varied sources as possible. Scholars often describe Alberti the way he portrayed himself in his one surviving drawing, as a brilliant loner who crafted the style and content of his works on his own. Some of the time, however, he may well have understood his career in very different terms, as that of what Foucault called a ‘writer function’, whose texts were perfected, if not executed, in close collaboration with trusted counsellors.

Many riddles remain. What religion, if any, did Alberti believe in? He often clothed Christian terms and structures with classical terms and façades. Yet in his discussion of the basilica in On the Art of Building, he evoked with apparent approval the spare rituals of early Christianity, when ‘it was the custom for good men to come together and share a common meal. They did not do this to fill their bodies at a feast, but to become humbler through their communication.’ He praised the ‘eloquent sermons’ of the bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries, when even a basilica would have ‘a single altar, where they would meet to celebrate no more than one sacrifice a day’. And he sharply criticised the bishops of his own day, who ‘to preserve their dignity, allow the people to see them scarcely once in the year of festivals, yet so stuff everything with altars’. His preference for early Christianity does not seem feigned.

Was Alberti the defender of popular liberty that some have found in his epistle on the 1453 conspiracy of Stefano Porcari against Pope Nicholas V? Or was he the disillusioned courtier who explained, in his treatise on agriculture, how to build the right sort of castle for a tyrant – as well as that for a legitimate prince – and wrote his treatise on ciphers because ambassadors and those they reported to had to protect their communications against ‘the common perfidy of men’? Cicero taught Alberti that the arts take time to develop. The same holds for scholarship in general, and on Alberti in particular. Historians, literary scholars and classicists will be climbing Mount Leon Battista for quite a while, and the summit is not in sight. This learned, lucid book takes us a long way up the slope.