Father of the Renaissance

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Leon Battista Alberti is one of those great men whose greatness one has to struggle to appreciate.

In the histories he is second only to Filippo Brunelleschi as a progenitor of Renaissance architecture, to whom every classical pediment or column on any building built anywhere in the last half millennium, owes a distant or close debt.

Yet, if you make the dutiful journey to his few built works, in Florence, Mantua and Rimini, and stand solemnly in the slightly sad public spaces they tend to face, it's hard not to experience guilty disappointment that the anxious, desiccated elevations of these supposed masterpieces don't communicate the direct pleasure of a Brunelleschi arcade, or the awe of his dome for Florence Cathedral.

It's therefore a relief to find that this dryish but informative book is not just about his architecture, and that it considers the possibility, raised by some historians, that he wasn't an architectural genius after all. Instead it tells the story of a fascinating, complex, depressive, energetic man, the bastard son of an exiled noble family, forever preoccupied with questions of legitimacy and acceptance, and wealth and the lack of it. Moving about the courts of Renaissance Italy, Alberti fretted and theorised about the ways in which ancient Roman culture

could be adapted and recreated in his own world.

He wrote copious texts: about the best and most virtuous ways to write, to paint, to sculpt, to run a family, to ride a horse, to walk down the street, and to commission, design and construct buildings, always with reference to classical precedents. In his thirties he wrote an anonymous autobiography, attributing to himself phenomenal physical, intellectual and moral feats, describing himself as the perfect Renaissance man. Whatever the truth of these claims, he could legitimately boast of writing his epoch's definitive theoretical books on both painting and architecture.

It's tempting to think that ancient Rome was a sort of surrogate family for Alberti, and that he sought in it the authority and stability which his own personal history denied him. If so, he wasn't alone. He lived in a time of violently fluctuating fortunes for both old families and the newly, insecurely rich. Like Alberti such people were anxious to assert the stability and legitimacy they didn't actually have, a situation of which the perfect emblem is the fa?ade Alberti designed for the palace of the Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai. Its hefty stones assert power, strength and security, and its system of ornament is taken from the most impressive of all Roman buildings, the Colosseum, yet it ends in a ragged edge, where it was to have been continued over an adjoining building that Rucellai never acquired. This edge suddenly makes it look papery and flimsy, reinforcing the point Alberti himself made when he decorated it with carvings of ships' sails, to represent the fragility of fortune. From such

insecurity came ferocious arguments, that now seem arcane, as to who displayed the more true under-standing of ancient Rome, and the correct reconciliation of classical and Christian culture. One of Alberti's clients, Sigismondo Malatesta, was officially sent to hell while still alive by Pope Pius II, who gave as one of his reasons the pagan - ie, overly Roman - appearance of the church Alberti designed for him. It didn't help that the church was in part dedicated to someone no more saintly than Sigismondo's lover.

One curious fact about Alberti is that his buildings are typically incomplete, or not complete in the way he envisaged, and are adaptations of existing structures, or, which is true of most of them, all of the above. Some, as writers other than Anthony Grafton have suggested, were literally impossible to complete, as the rigorous theoretical rules Alberti set himself could not be reconciled with each other or with physical reality. Read alongside Grafton's descriptions of the fissures and tensions in the supposed serenity of Renaissance Italy, this chronic incompleteness becomes their most intriguing quality. They become testaments of longing for a repose Alberti felt unable to achieve, dreams of order rudely awakened by the abrupt truncation of an arch, pilaster or wall.

Lastly, a word on misogyny, of which Alberti had an ample supply. His views on the fickleness and proper, lowly, place of women were directly connected to his views on restraint and dignity in architecture, views which have shaped both the design of buildings and the profession of architecture from his day to ours. You don't have to be a slave to political correctness to be perturbed by this and wonder what subtle harm it might have done.