# Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 4

IV
LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI
This present age of literary dilettanteism, of elegant scribbling, has chosen to represent the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the most glorious epoch of the Italian people, as the Renaissance of all grandeur and all beauty. We men and women of today admire civilization through guide-books and picture-postcards; powerless to create new monuments, we boast that we love the monuments of old; incapable of heroic action, we sit by the fire and read of the heroes of Homer and Villani. We prefer the polished elegance of church or palace to the bristling stone of the fortress—and we exalt the Quattrocento. Our own literary epoch has magnified a former literary epoch; and the legend of the "Dark Ages" still endures.
The fifteenth century was a time of rebirth, but it was a time of death as well; and we have failed to ask whether the renewal of certain elements of life brought full compensation for the loss of the elements that disappeared. The very ​gentleness of our sedentary culture has led us to love and admire the extraordinary century that witnessed our undoing and initiated our deepest decadence. The Quattrocento marks the transition from the active, original, rough, strong civilization of the Middle Ages to the verbal, imitative, insincere, pacific civilization of the succeeding centuries. In the Quattrocento the man of action yields to the man of words; the book takes the place of the sword; the fortress becomes a villa garden; skeptical dilettanteism casts out faith. Great words win honor such as hitherto had been accorded to great deeds alone. Achievement ended, men tell of past achievement. Art and literature, which had served for the expression of spiritual energy, become clever means of acquiring fame and power.
The man who knew little of letters but was strong in body and austere in spirit, the conqueror of kingdoms, the governor of cities, gives way to the insinuating humanist; and the humanist, grown lean in the study of Cicero, admiring strenuous deeds in safe seclusion, becomes the historian of the past and the prophet of the future, but has neither the wit nor the power to act in the present. To a civilization of muscles, stone, and iron, there succeeds a civilization of nerves, pens, and papers. There are poets a-plenty for the writing of pæans, but there are no heroes for ​them to celebrate. As a philosopher might put it, the dominion of the external gives place to the dominion of the internal.
The period we are wont to call the Renaissance appears, then, to be in certain respects a period of weakening and decline. And if Italy would return to a life more intense and more energetic than that which now she leads amid verbal pyrotechnics and the academic discourses of Parliament, she must resolutely expel the dangerous maladies which the Renaissance introduced into her blood, must return to deeper and more bitter springs, must forget the lust of ornament and the delights of rhetoric, must set herself to action rather than to speech, to new achievement rather than to admiration.
Such thoughts as these might well be suggested by the centenary of Leon Battista Alberti if such occasions, instead of serving merely for the display of erudition and municipal vanity, really led us to seek the essential message and the continuing inspiration of the great men they celebrate.
For Alberti signifies the passage from the heroic, active life of the Middle Ages to the graceful, wordy epoch that ensued, and illustrates, even more clearly than Petrarch or Leonardo, that softening of the conceptions of life which was to lead at last to the spiritual degeneration of the seventeenth century. He is indeed, to ​borrow Emerson's term, the "representative man" of the Quattrocentro, of an age sad and wondrous in its ambiguity and its versatility. His life is truly a mirror of the time.
Consider his ancestry. He came of that glorious Alberti family which has given Florence so many successful merchants, energetic statesmen, and turbulent partisans. Shortly before the time of his birth the family had been banished, and Leon Battista was born in exile in Genoa, where his kinsmen continued their mercantile pursuits and plotted a return to Florence. He might have become a merchant-politician like his ancestors, might have won riches and governed men. He preferred, on the contrary, to devote himself to letters. Study attracted him. He wished to know Greek and Latin, to read Plato and Virgil; he had no desire to export cloths to the East, or to measure his strength with the leader of a hostile faction.
In his childhood his father sought to train his body, to make him strong and handsome; and they tell us, indeed, that he could tame wild horses, and that he used to climb pathless mountains. But the lure of letters called him to Bologna and the law; and he turned to study with such ardor that he lost his health and became a lean and trembling scholar, suffering from nervous ills and absentmindedness.
​Even so the whole race was losing its vigor amid studies and pleasures, and the time of its ignoble paralysis was near at hand.
But study consoled Alberti for all that he had lost; letters and philosophy led him to scorn all else. Perilous indeed is contact with the ancients! The men of the Quattrocento, like barbarians come to a marvelous city, were overwhelmed with reverence for the divine Latin works. They had no hope of reaching higher excellence; they sought a similar perfection; they could but imitate. Their greatest desire was that scholars should think their writings a recovered treasure. So when Alberti, in spare hours at Bologna, wrote a comedy, the Philodoxeos, in which he allegorized his love of learning, he himself spread the rumor that it was a new-found piece by an ancient writer of comedies named Lepidus—and had the satisfaction of deceiving his literary friends.
There no longer existed that indifference to glory which had marked the obscure artisans of the Middle Ages, the nameless builders and sculptors of the great cathedrals; nor had there yet appeared the complacent modern genius, who, sure of himself and of the novelty of his work, sends it forth under his own name. The men of the Quattrocento sought shelter under ​classic robes: they strove not to do more than the ancients, but to do as the ancients had done.
This attitude of intellectual servility is to be found throughout the work of Alberti. In his moral treatises he mingles Stoic ethics with the traditions of Christian goodness and of Florentine frugality. In his books on art he supports his precepts by the authority of ancient writings and by the example of ancient works. In his architectural designs Roman triumphal arches become doorways, and he is classic at any cost.
Even when, as in the Rucellai palace, he did not entirely abandon local tradition, he introduced into the mediæval forms a grace derived from classic models and from the teachings of Vitruvius. So in Rimini he did his best to bury the little Franciscan church under the splendor of his Hellenizing imagination; and in the Temple of the Divine Isotta he expressed the very spirit of the learned tyrant, Sigismondo Malatesta, who had achieved a complete denial of the Christian motives of the preceding age.
He refined—that is, he weakened. His structures are more graceful and less solid, more regular and less original. Out of the stern old Florentine palace with its rough-hewn blocks projecting as though in challenge he made the elegant Palazzo Rucellai, whose joyously rising pilasters and smooth ordered stones are an æsthetic ​delight—utterly without menace. For mediæval ferocity he substitutes pagan pleasantness.
I regard Alberti as one of the most completely Hellenic of all Italians. He had the Attic sense of measure, of order, of regularity. His love of geometry (vide Milhaud's theory of the geometrical foundation of Greek culture), his search for the perfect type of human beauty, his care in measurement, and his passion for the architectonic, the symmetrical, the non-fantastic, bring him close to the intellectual type of the Greeks.
And he resembled them, as well, in the varied curiosity that made him turn from law to letters, from painting to architecture or sculpture, from physics to mathematics, from religion and ethics to grammar. He was the first of those universal men of the Renaissance whose line was to culminate in Leonardo: men who stopped work on an equestrian statue to write an apologue, or turned to the invention of military engines after the building of a church or the conclusion of a series of scientific experiments.
In this respect also Alberti expresses that liberating tendency which developed after the firmly organic society of the Middle Ages had broken up, and men no longer felt themselves bound to city, art, and guild, but rather, like greyhounds freed of the leash, sped hither and yon in search ​of any prey. The limited man, the man of a single interest, had disappeared; in his stead came the complete, the universal man. Dilettanteism had begun: that man was called "virtuous" who knew something of everything, to whom nothing was new.
While versatility was represented by men of the prodigious energy of Alberti and Leonardo, it was by no means vain, but when small spirits attempted all things, spoiled all things, and belittled all things, then versatility led to decadence.
Even Alberti's versatility was more apparent than real, was a matter rather of letters than of practice. He wrote on many topics, but he did not actually do many different things. He formulated precepts for painting and for sculpture, but he left neither paintings nor statues. He designed many buildings, but he brought only a few to completion. His writings are numerous: his only practical activities are his journeys and his service as secretary of the Papal chancery.
His universality, then, was more verbal than concrete. He produced instructions rather than works; he was more disposed to say what should be done than to act himself. And he thus reveals the aristocratic instinct transmitted to him by the rich and powerful family from which he sprang. In the field of art his attitude is that of the condescending nobleman, not that of the busy ​rising artisan. He gives orders to be carried out by his inferiors, and does not deign to work with his own hands.
He feels the superiority of the creative intellect, of the imaginative spirit. He would be the mind that originates, the will that commands, not the base instrument of material execution. He brought into art his inherited nobility; and the Renaissance received from him that spiritual aristocracy that made it so marvelous and so ephemeral.
Before the century grew dark and the first barbarians came over the Alps to plunder Italy, helpless in her refinement, Alberti died serenely at Rome, in 1472. He had written that man is "like a ship destined not to rot in the harbor, but to plow new paths over the sea, and to tend ever through self-exercise toward praise and the fruit of glory." And in this sense he had been indeed a voyager.
Perhaps the very extent of his verbal versatility kept him from greater actual achievement. In the presence of his multiform and restless spirit, one thinks of his experience with the ship of the Lake of Nemi. Tradition had it that an ancient trireme lay sunken in this lake. Cardinal Colonna commissioned Alberti to try to raise it, and he, by clever mechanisms, succeeded in sending divers down and in bringing up the prow ​and part of the hull. But lack of money or of efficient machinery prevented the completion of the task, and the fair ship remained for centuries beneath the waters.
Just so Alberti has made known some portions of his soul, and it is for us to plumb the depths to discover all that he did not reveal. Instead of gathering laboriously the data of his external life, we may well reconstruct in ourselves his inner experience. So only can the dead be our masters; so only can the great lead us to still greater heights.