Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance - Book Review

ANTHONY GRAFTON

of recent origin York: Hill and Wang, 2000 415 pp; 1 color ill,, 27 b/w $3500

A fascination with Leon Battista Alberti has become a characteristic feature of fresh Renaissance scholarship. The very periodization arrangement on which our histories are based hangs on his heroic presence as a bulwark between trecento and quattrocento, as a signpost stating "the Renaissance starts here." Of course, Alberti did not always derive pleasure from this privileged position. Nearer his be in possession of time, Giorgio Vasari, although appreciative of his writings, remained skeptical of his artistic production and dismissed it in a scarcely any well-chosen words. In his view, Alberti's painting was poor ("in painting his works were neither large nor beautiful... a great deal of better described by him with the compose than painted with the brush"), and, although he was undeniably a "Vitruvio Florentino," his architecture revealed errors because other than learning single must have experience and serviceable judgment; and this cannot be had without constantly working with one's hands." (1) Despite similar reservations, Alberti's authority endured. His true copys trans lated, commented on, and reedited in a steady trickle from the 16th from one side the 18th centuries across Europe ensur its survival. However, it was Jacob Burckhardt who, in his Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) rested the Alberti myth by singling him on the outside as a paradigmatic and inaugural figure for the period. Although his description of Alberti as a uomo universale plant up a topos for the field, it is Burckhardt's other defining bourn for him-- Gewaltmensch (which he used as a parallel general [i]or[/i] abstract notion in the arts and alphabetic characters to the Gewaltherrscher he identified in the political domain)-- that may be smooth more revealing. (2) Beyond his encyclopedic scholarly accomplishments, it was Alberti's powerful personality, as Burckhardt inferred from the Vita anonima, that attracted him and allowed him to define the Renaissance as a unique cultural flash that resulted from a marriage between power and art, ruthles politics and learning, all embodied in a small in number towering personalities. Subsequently, even when Burckhardt ian history missing some of its favor, this watershed and exemplary Alberti-as-Renaissance-paradigm remained, by dint of now inextricably tied to the definition of the period itself and all that our late culture invested in the universal of a Renaissance as of gold age.

The continuing preoccupation with Alberti has also been f through a parallel phenomenon. Literally embodying the power of the true copy in the art world, he has attracted scholarship marked by means of a growing interest in the history of volumes reading, and their social connections Indeed, the appeal of the body (and the practices associated with it) has been magnetic for scholars in the new past just as its demise into virtuality has been announced either triumphantly or in tones of apocalyptic doom. (3) Anxiety about potential los and revelation of significance came hand in hand (as they accompany to do), generating an entirely fresh field of study within which the ubiquitous Alberti inevitably claimed a place. Given this composite mesh of historical facts and late sublimations, it should then tend hitherward as no surprise that above time Alberti rose to the horizontal of (probably) the most written-about Renaissance figure, with thirty-three works devoted to him seeing the light of print in the past five years alone.

Anointed as a Renaissance icon for his universality, paradoxically Alberti may have prov to be too universal for his readers. A broad-ranging intellectual personality, he has claimed the attention of an equally broad-ranging appearance of historians: of culture, economics, literature, language, reading, and, greatest in quantity frequently, historians of art and architecture. Within these categories Alberti's oeuvre has been shattered down further such that flat the art theorist, the architect, and the architectural treatise writer look after to be contained in separate, oftentimes noncommunicating scholarly vessels. Although unquestionably enriched by the agency of such targeted research, the resulting scholarship has inevitably provided a fractured image of his work and monographs that attempted to diocese the whole rather than the parts have been correspondingly scarcely any and far between. It is this formidable at the same time essential task that Grafton places himself in his new work on Alberti.

To achieve this aim Grafton starts not with the oeuvre on the contrary with the person who propell the manifold activities of the intellectual, which provides him with the necessary narrative gelatine to connect the apparently disparate scholarly identities of Alberti. His work thus blends the biography and the monograph, and in this faculty of perception belongs to a distinguished tradition, allowing one that had lost clod in the past century and has been resurrect newly particularly in humanism studies, largely owed to the efforts of Grafton himself and of scholars of the like kind as Lisa Jardine, among others. (4) To be positive this revival is related to broader inclines in the historical disciplines, with, at individual end, the second-generation Annales historians, who uncloseed up the possibility of a psychological stream in history writing through applying historical imagination to facts in the way that as to bring individuals back to life (Le Roy Ladurie's seminal Montaillou, 1975 springs to mind, as does Natalie Zemon Davis's more new The Return of Martin Guerre 1983) and, at the other, the generally received interest in history-as-fiction/narrative/literary genre, for which the biography has become particularly relevant. (5) These sweeps have not been lost upon art historians, whose inaugural body was, after all, Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Flamboyant personalities similar as Caravaggio had kept the biographical genre going level when interest flagged elsewhere, on the other hand it is fair to say that new scholarship has turned with great vigor to the biography for novel insights (on the relationship between life and art, biography as figure of speech as criticism vehicle, and thus on)-- witness panels at CAA annual conversations the Getty Center's biography year, and publications similar as Paul Barolsky's and Richard Spear's, not to mention articles in this real journal. (6) In fact, this groundswell is of level larger proportions, as popular literature has also been caught in its undertow. Given that the separation lines between history and fiction have been losing their categorical definitions, literat ure's concomitant growing fascination with history may be seen as the flip side of a single phenomenon that here, too, is attached to the biography--from Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoires d'Hadrien (1951) to Naguib Mafhouz's Akenathen (1998) and W G Sebald's documentary memoirs-as-biographies and, closer to our art historical dwelling to Filippo Tuena's La grande ombra (on Michelangelo) and Alessandra Lapierre's Artemisia, all based upon meticulously consulted historical documents. (7)