Grammar and Expression in Early Renaissance Architecture: Brunelleschi and Alberti

Author(s): Charles Burroughs

Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 34 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 39-63
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20140404
Accessed: 11-10-2018 13:34 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, The University of Chicago Press are
collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to RES: Anthropology and
Aesthetics

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Grammar and expression in early Renaissance
architecture
Brunelleschi and Alberti
CHARLES BURROUGHS
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) exemplifies "the
shift from the artisan to the learned artist creator." So
writes the eminent Alberti scholar Cecil Grayson, and
there are perhaps few who would disagree.1 But
Grayson's seemingly unremarkable assertion implies the
acceptance of a single standard and content of learning,
evidently in contrast to the knowledge accumulated by
"artisans," in which, nevertheless, Alberti himself
showed a lively interest.2 Clearly, Grayson's "learning" is
specifically that of humanism, of which Alberti was a
leading, if sometimes ambivalent, exponent.3
Grayson's brief account of epochal change
(published, it should be noted, in 1972) implicitly
assigns to Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) the role of
"artisan,"1 as inventor of technical procedures
theorized-indeed transmuted into "learning" by
Alberti, an assessment by and large also conveyed in the
latest monograph on the older architect.4 Indeed,
1. C. Grayson, ed., Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting and On
Sculpture. The Latin Texts of "De Pictura' and "De Statua" (London:
Phaidon, 1 972), p. 8. For an approving citation of this passage, see G.
Schweikhart, "Piero de' Medici, Alberti und Filarete," in Piero de'
Medici "il gottoso" (1416-1469): Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer, ed.
U. Beyer and B. Boucher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), p. 371.
2. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria 111.2 (L'architettura,
ed. G. Orlandi and P. Portoghesi [Milan: II Polifilo, 1966], 1:180/181;
cf. On the Art of Building in Ten Books, ed. J. Rykwert, R. Tavernor,
and N. Leach [Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1 988], p. 6).
3. Alberti, of course, spent his life playing roles, including that of
"humanist," with extreme self-consciousness; see, e.g., M. Baxandall,
Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and
the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450, Oxford-Warburg
Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 121: "Alberti was a
completely equipped humanist, but when he writes about painting he
no longer belongs entirely with the humanists; he is instead a painter,
perhaps of a rather eccentric kind, with access to humanist resources."
On Alberti's ambivalence in general, see M. Tafuri, "'Cives esse non
licere.' Niccolo V e Leon Battista Alberti," in Ricerca del Rinascimento:
principi, citta, architetti (Turin: Einaudi, 1 992), pp. 33-88; M.
Jarzombek, On Leon Baptista Alberti: His Literary and Artistic Theories
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989).
4. H. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, The Buildings (London and
University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press, 1993). (Cf.,
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Brunelleschi apprenticed with a goldsmith and never
showed any interest in turning himself into a humanist,
a career-enhancing strategy followed by his
contemporary, the occasional architect Lorenzo
Ghiberti, as well as much later, more assiduously and
famously, by Andrea Palladio.5
In my view, Brunelleschi's achievement depended,
even if indirectly, on a crucial late-medieval intellectual
disciplinary and discursive domain-a field of
"learning"-that humanism in general opposed and
ultimately destroyed. The field in question was the
philosophical study of grammar, a subject of particular
interest to Alberti, whose approach to the subject was,
however, conducted on quite different premises and
whose emergence as an architect, as I will suggest,
depended not only on the careful formulation of a
critical position toward Brunelleschi's architecture in
general, but also on the close involvement in the
assessment and elaboration of a particular Brunelleschian
project. Most accounts of Alberti's career represent his
direct experience of architectural planning and design
as opposed to the engagement with theory and the
legacy of antiquity-as subsequent to the writing of his
architectural treatise.6 I will consider the possibility that
id., "Vecchie e nuove prospettive sul Brunelleschi," in Filippo
Brunelleschi: la sua opera e il suo tempo, ed. Pina Ragionieri [Florence:
Centro Di, 19801, p. 476). Saalman reacts against an older tradition of
scholarship that stamped Brunelleschi as the great herald of modernity;
he finds, however, that "the truly revolutionary thinker and planner of
the Early Renaissance was Leon Battista Alberti, who turned
architectural theory and practice in a wholly new direction" (p. 422).
This is surely as exaggerated a view as the one Saalman rejects.
5. On Ghiberti as architect, see A. Bruschi, "Note sulla
formazione architettonica dell'Alberti," Palladio 25 (1 978):1 8.
6. Bruschi (ibid., p. 14) stresses Alberti's earlier interest in
architecture but associates him with a current of "sculptor's
architecture" in the late 1430s (Donatello, Ghiberti, Michelozzo, etc.)
and even entertains the suggestion (p. 15, cf. p. 20) that "Albertian
ideas," if not Alberti, played an active role in the elaboration of this.
He maintains (p. 27) that serious work on the treatise could not have
commenced until circa 1443, the year of Alberti's return to Rome. But
he also argues that Alberti's initial involvement in an architectural
design process occurred when Alberti was in Ferrara, especially in
1442, when he evidently played a role-as architect?-in the design of
the Arco del Cavallo for Leonello d'Este, soon after the latter's
40 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998

in architecture, as in many of Alberti's fields of interest, churches, the latter motivated by the threat of Ottoman
contemplation and action were closely linked.7 power that, in little more than a decade, would engulf
Constantinople itself.9 The pope was lodged and the
council sessions located at the great Dominican
monastery and center of learning of S. Maria Novella.
In Florence in 1441, the recently completed dome of This was the site of the famous exchanges between
the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore loomed over a senior representatives of Greek intellectual traditions
spectacle of remarkable irrelevance to the sacred values and individuals in the western delegation who had risen
and purposes the great building had been constructed to to prominence through distinction in "the new learning"
accommodate and express. One by one, men came of humanism, which ideally encompassed direct and
forward-hardly a priest among them-and before a profound exposure to ancient Greek as well as Latin
large and attentive audience declaimed verses, not on letters.10 On paper, the council ended successfully in
the relations between humankind and a transcendent 1439 with the proclamation in the cathedral of the
deity, but between man and man. The theme of the union of the Latin and Greek churches, though this was
verses was friendship; the organizer, who himself wrote never accepted by many Byzantines and was anyway
a lengthy prose meditation on the topic for the occasion, soon overtaken by the Turkish advance. The advantages
was Leon Battista Alberti.8 sought by the Florentine government in expensively
Since 1434, Alberti had been in Florence with the hosting the council, however, were no doubt not
papal court, which he served as an official in the primarily of religious nature, but had to do rather with
secretariat of Pope Eugenius IV. The pope was in securing the inextricably entwined commercial and
Florence to preside over a council summoned to cultural prominence of the city. The Medicean regime
negotiate the reconciliation of the western and eastern went to great lengths to attract the council to Florence,
an outcome requiring extensive negotiations that were
accession as duke. Bruschi emphasizes the arch's formal links with entrusted to Lorenzo de' Medici, Cosimo's brother."1
current Florentine work, rather than Roman antiquity. See now C. The readings in the cathedral in 1441, therefore, had
Rosenberg, The Este Monuments and Urban Development in
something of an official character and were certainly
Renaissance Ferrara (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), pp. 57-61; after a detailed review of the evidence,
associated with Florentine and Medicean concerns with
Rosenberg finds Alberti's involvement in the project extremely both external and internal self-representation. No doubt
probable. C. Grayson, "The Composition of L. B. Alberti's Decem libri to spur public interest, the readings were conducted as a
de re aedificatoria," MuinchnerJahrbuch far Kunstgeschichte 11 competition; the prize was a silver laurel wreath that
(1960):155, notes expressions of interest in architecture in Alberti's
presumably, in the long tradition of poetic coronations,
writings between 1435 and 1440, sufficient in Grayson's view to
justify acceptance of 1452 as the effective completion date of the
was to crown the victor. Accordingly, the event itself
treatise. bore the title certame coronario.12 A jury of some of the
7. The immediate objection to this is the shift at the beginning of most qualified professional writers of the day
book six of the De re aedificatoria from a more theoretical approach members of the papal chancery, colleagues of Alberti
to one firmly based in the study of the monuments and the
sat in judgment over the poems declaimed before them,
implications of this for current design practice; see Bruschi (see note
5), p. 30. though some authors (including Alberti himself) read
8. The fullest account of this is G. Gorni, "Storia del Certame works that were not entered in the competition for the
coronario," Rinascimento 22 (1972):135-181; cf., id., "Certame wreath. The judges failed to reach unanimity regarding
coronario," Lingua Nostra 37 (1976):11-14. See also G. Mancini, Vita the appropriate recipient of the laurel wreath and some
di Leon Battista Alberti, 2d. ed. (Rome: Bardi, 1967), pp. 200-216, seem to have been antipathetic to the whole
with a list of participants; G. Ponte, Leon Battista A/berti, umanista e
scrittore (Genoa: Tilgher-Genova, 1981), pp. 180-187. For the texts,
see L. Bertolini, ed., De vera amicitia: i testi del primo Certame
coronario (Ferrara: Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali and Franco Cosimo 9. J. Gill, The Council of Florence (New York: AMS Press, 1982);
Panini, 1993). Alberti's prose work became book four of the Della Mancini (see note 8), pp. 153ff.
Famiglia; he also wrote a poem in hexameters on friendship. See 10. On the council in general, see Gill (see note 9).
Bertolini, pp. 153-155; L. B. Alberti, Rime e versioni poetiche, ed. 11. Ibid., p. 229.
G. Gorni (Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1975), no. 18, 12. This is the term used by Alberti himself, though it was
pp. 100-1 04. Alberti declaimed his poem in the cathedral, but certainly not used consistently in contemporary references to the
probably not as an entry in the competition. event. See Gorni, "Certame coronario" (see note 8), p. 12.

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 B3urrough>: (mrrnmar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 41
enterprise.13 In the end, they awarded the wreath to the
building in which the event was held, the cathedral
itself, thereby unleashing a storm of controversy.
It was not the content but the medium of the poems
read in the cathedral in 1441 that engendered
vehemently opposed views. They were neither in Latin
nor in Greek, but in the Tuscan vernacular. Alberti's
marked interest in this in the 1430s and early 1440s,
however, was to a degree that of a self-conscious
cultural outsider, born in Genoa and raised in Venice
and Padua.14 Indeed, shortly after the certame he
authored the first grammar of the Tuscan dialect (or of
the Italian language in general), ordering and
objectifying what came naturally to Florentines. In
late-medieval Florence, as Paul Gehl has noted, all
grammatical training was part of the process of
latinization, involving the acquisition not just of Latin,
but also of bilingualism, not to speak of access to
professional, technical, and intellectual domains closed
to those with facility only in the vernacular.15 Alberti's
grammar displays the regularity of the vernacular first
language and its susceptibility to analysis in the same
way as Latin. Its thrust, therefore, is more a matter of
polemics than pedagogy, raising the prospect of a
13. Mancini (see note 8), p. 205
14. R. N. Watkins, The Family in Renaissance Florence
(Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1969),
p. 4. Alberti's mother was Genoese, but she died in 1406. Doubtless
his father, Lorenzo, and other relatives used Tuscan with Leon Battista
and his brother, but until 1428 or, more certainly, 1434, Leon Battista
was never immersed in a Tuscan-speaking environment. For the
contrast between the language of the first and second books of the
Della Famiglia, written in Rome, and the third book, written in
Florence, and for Alberti's own reference to the significance of his
presence in Florence for his own command of the vernacular, see
ibid., p. 7.
15. P. F. Gehl, A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in
Trecento Florence (Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University
Press, 1993), pp. 27, 32-34, 102f., notes the status of Latin in the
fourteenth century as a "second language" not mastered as fully as the
vernacular. Nor did Latin have the rich expressive resources of the
various dialects of Italy. Not surprisingly, by the early fifteenth century,
Italian was beginning to usurp the position of Latin in certain contexts;
in 1415, legislation was passed that all guild contracts should be in
the volgare, as noted by J. Onians, "Brunelleschi: Humanist or
Nationalist," Art History 5 (1982):263. But Onians makes too much of
this: Latin continued to be the medium of instruction for all notaries,
and the formularies that they used in drawing up cases were not
translated. See Gehl (p. 37) on the persistence of the separation of the
two linguistic realms "until well into the fifteenth century," though he
also notes the expanding use of Italian in legal and other contexts
formerly reserved for Latin.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
relatively unified culture centered in Florence and
ideally defined by the topography of language use rather
than by the socially and economically determined
access to exclusive forms and sites of instruction. But
Alberti's grammar also challenged the monopoly of the
existing educational regime in the provision of
grammatical training, with all the moral associations that
Gehl has brought into focus. Not only linguistic usage or
educational practices, but also significant cultural patterns
and institutional interests were ultimately at stake.
In the existing structures of Latin instruction,
grammatical study provided the foundation and led to
the teaching of composition. In his engagement with the
vernacular, Alberti reversed this sequence: his grammar,
written around 1443, chronologically followed the
certame and other projects intended to advance the
cause of literary expression in the vernacular. The
certame, moreover, raised to the level of spectacle (as
some called it) a debate that had previously been
confined to literary exchanges.16 The protagonists of
these had been, however, two of the greatest exponents
of early-fifteenth-century humanism, Leonardo Bruni in
1441, the chancellor of Florence-and Flavio Biondo.17
The argument between Biondo and Bruni had begun as
a debate already a kind of certame-in Florence in
1435. It turned essentially on the status of Italian as a
language of culture in its own right. Bruni held that
Italian was and always had been a degraded form of
Latin and was derived from the language of the streets of
ancient Italy. For both Biondo and Alberti, on the other
hand, Italian had succeeded Latin as the language of all
social classes. It had developed in response to historical
16. Niccolo Della Luna called the certame a "spectaculo"; see
Gorni, "Certame coronario" (see note 8), p. 12.
17. Mancini (see note 8), p. 193; M. Reeve, "Classical
scholarship," in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance
Humanism, ed. J. Kraye (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p. 39, with further bibliography. The debate
went back a long way: the founding text was perhaps Dante's De
vulgari eloquentia, though significantly Dante wrote this in a curiale
(courtly) idiom, that is, not in Florentine volgare, for which he would
be criticized by Machiavelli. See A. M. Codevilla, "Words and Power,"
in N. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. A. M. Codevilla,
commentary by W. B. Allen (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1 997), p. xxii. Dante's position was that "language should be
crafted to follow the dictates of reason, not of men or of chance." Such
a prehumanist position contrasts sharply with that of Alberti, but not
that of Brunelleschi, who shared the veneration of Dante characteristic
of the Burchiello set. The evidence for Brunelleschi's "Dante
scholarship" is well presented by E. Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi: The
Complete Work (New York: Electa, 1981), p. 320.
 42 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998
change, but especially under the impact of the
Germanic languages spoken by various invaders in the
turbulent centuries following the collapse of Roman
imperial order. Even after the flowering of vernacular
literature in fourteenth-century Florence, however,
Tuscan still seemed in need of refinement to Alberti and
those who shared his views. The almost obsessive
polishing Alberti gave to his vernacular works of the
1430s, his Italian version of the celebrated treatise "On
Painting" and the three books "On the Family" (to which
his work "On Friendship," written for the certame, was
appended as a fourth book), forms part of an attempt to
develop an appropriately elegant, flexible, and
needless to say latinate literary language.18
Indeed, the certame itself indicates that the binary
distinction of Latin and the vernacular obscured the
range of stylistic idioms and models available to those
concerned with literary expression in their native
language (much the same was also true, of course, of
writing in Latin). It is possible that the certame jurors
were more willing to recognize this diversity than
Alberti, with his commitment-expressly stated in the
preface to book three of the Della Famiglia-to a unitary
linguistic regime, at least in the context of writing.19
Alberti's favored entry in the competition was almost
certainly that of his friend and fellow papal bureaucrat
Leonardo Dati, whose attempt to write Italian
hexameters broke brusquely with local traditions of
vernacular versification, which were upheld by most
other competitors.20 The jurors were not impressed.
Alberti's response is known from a highly polemical
anonymous text known as the Protesta in which the
author, certainly Alberti himself, represents the jury's
18. Mancini (see note 8), pp. 230ff.
19. L. B. Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. R. Romano and A.
Tenenti (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), pp. 185-1 89. Obviously such unity (a
matter of the self-consciousness of Italians as a people) is distinct from
the "ornaments," including the variety, expected of a literary discourse.
Implicitly, if inconsistently, Alberti connects the discussion of language
with the idea of a gendered domestic space; in antiquity, he notes that
women spoke a purer Latin because less contaminated by linguistic
usage outside the home (p.1 87). In his own culture, however, slaves
(with whom women would come into contact) had great difficulty
picking up correct Italian. In Alberti's perception, then, the health of
the language and that of the household are closely intertwined and
equally embattled.
20. R. Ristori, s.v. "Leonardo Dati," Dizionario biografico degli
Italiani 33 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1987), p. 46,
with bibliography.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
decision as aroused by envy and as a scornful riposte to
the organizer.21 Many scholars have rashly taken Alberti
at his word, assuming that the blow of the failed
certame was enough to drive Alberti to a mood of bleak
pessimism and, a little later, to a return to Latin as his
literary language of choice. The central themes of the
Protesta appear in other of Alberti's writings, however,
suggesting a concern not so much to represent a given
state of affairs as to focus attention on general forces
affecting human conduct. The author of the Protesta
represents envy as the major force in play, and indeed
Alberti proceeded to select envy as the theme of a
second certame, which however never took place,
though Dati and others wrote pieces for it.22
A more compelling reason to read the Protesta
skeptically, however, is that it gives the highly
implausible impression that only Alberti and the jurors
had significant roles to play on this occasion.23
Whatever Alberti's reaction, it is surely far more likely
that the award was first of all an act of flattery to the
people of Florence and, in particular, the leading citizen
who financed the event and, we may suppose, saw to it
that the cathedral was made available. This was Piero di
Cosimo de' Medici, elder son of the effective ruler of
Florence since 1434. Piero's key role, along with his
younger brother, in the cultural policies of the Medici
has been emphasized and documented in many recent
studies. There can be no doubt of the larger strategic
purpose of his involvement in the events of 1441, while
21. For the text of the Protesta, see Gorni, "Storia del certame"
(see note 8), Appendix 1, pp. 167-1 81; Bertolini (see note 8),
pp. 501-513.
22. G. Gorni, "Dalla famiglia alla corte: itinerari e allegorie
nell'opera di Leon Battista Alberti," Bibliotheque d'humanisme et de la
Renaissance 43 (1981):251. The reason for the cancellation of the
second certame is not known, and the opposition aroused by the first
is often adduced in explanation. It is perhaps relevant, however, that
Dati suffered some disgrace in late 1441 that blocked his career at the
papal court at least until 1445. The nature of Dati's offense is not
known, but it was perhaps scandalous enough to kill an event with
which he was closely and conspicuously associated. See Ristori (see
note 20), p. 47.
23. G. Tanturli, "Rapporti letterari del Brunelleschi con gli
ambienti letterari fiorentini," in Filippo Brunelleschi: la sua opera e il
suo tempo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence: Centro Di, 1980), p. 130,
writes of Alberti's "cocente delusione" provoked by the smacco of the
certame; cf. J. K. Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the
Early Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 218;
and G. Gorni's note in Alberti (see note 8), pp. 1 OOf.
 Burr-oughs C ramnat and expression in early Renaissance architecture 43
the projected topic of the second certame, envy, was a
particular concern of Piero's father, Cosimo.24
The certame coronario offered Piero, though still
young (he was born in 141 6), a timely and conspicuous
stage on which to display himself as a patron of culture.
Two events of 1440 had greatly affected both the
standing of the Medici in the city and Piero's potential
personal role. The victory of Anghiari suppressed major
external as well as internal threats to the Medicean
regime;25and Piero's uncle Lorenzo, younger brother
and close partner of Cosimo de' Medici, died, leaving a
clear opportunity and even need for the members of the
younger generation to establish themselves in the
political and cultural affairs of the city.26 The
commission at this time of formal portraits of Piero and
his brother was surely accomplished in part to
emphasize their new status.27
24. Cosimo apparently thought a lot about envy; see S. McKillop,
"Dante and Lumen Christi: A Proposal for the Meaning of the Tomb of
Cosimo de' Medici," in Cosimo 'il Vecchio' de' Medici 1389-1464,
ed. F. Ames-Lewis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), pp. 260ff., quoting both Vespasiano da Bisticci and
Machiavelli. See also W. Bulst, "Uso e trasformazione del Palazzo
mediceo fino ai Riccardi," in 1I Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed.
G. Cherubini and G. Fanelli (Florence: Giunti, 1990), p. 107, on the
possible architectural consequences of Cosimo's concern to avoid
provoking envy. Envy was also a particular concern of Alberti; see
Mancini (see note 8), p. 148.
25. On the battle of Anghiari, see N. Rubinstein, The Palazzo
Vecchio, 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the
Civic Pa/ace of the Florentine Republic, Oxford-Warburg Studies
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 74. The Florentine forces
overcame a Milanese army, associated, as usual on such occasions,
with Florentine fuorusciti. The leading Florentine exile hoping to return
to a position of power within the city with foreign help was Rinaldo
degli Albizzi. His defeat marked the end of serious internal opposition
to the Medici regime for over a decade.
26. A. Tonnesmann, "Zwischen Birgerhaus und Residenz: zur
sozialen Typik des Palazzo Medici," in Piero de' Medici "il gottoso"
(1416-1469): Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer, ed. U. Beyer and B.
Boucher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), p. 77, emphasizes the
distinct patronage styles and roles of Cosimo and Lorenzo, noting the
latter's expansive and courtly Reprasentationsstil in contrast with
Cosimo's modesty and attention to civic values.
27. M. Boskovits, "Studi sul ritratto fiorentino nel quattrocento,
II," Arte cristiana 782 (1 998):335f., discusses a pair of portraits of
young men of the Medici family, as indicated by the arms on the
reverse. He reaffirms the identification of the sitters as Piero and
Giovanni di Cosimo and the attribution of the paintings to Andrea del
Castagno. He dates these-originally, he thinks, parts of a diptych to
1442, at latest, and connects them with donor portraits in the roughly
contemporary Adoration of the Magi by Domenico Veneziano (Berlin).
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
In Piero's case, at least, a portrait was perhaps
necessary because he was not well known in Florence.
He had not returned to Florence with his father in 1434
but had stayed on in northern cities and courts, notably
Venice and Ferrara. In Ferrara he had encountered the
highly influential pedagogy of the famous humanist
Guarino da Verona, and it was probably in the circle
around Guarino that Piero and Alberti became
acquainted.28 A third crucial event of 1440, however,
was the accession of Leonello d'Este as Duke of Ferrara.
Leonello, whose education had been entrusted to
Guarino, did not disappoint his tutor's expectations and
quickly took steps to make Ferrara a center of the
evolving culture of humanism, though with a distinctly
courtly inflection.
Leonello was not slow to support innovative work in
the visual arts, favoring competitive procedures. Soon
after his accession, he commissioned Jacopo Bellini and
Pisanello, in rivalry, to produce portraits of him, roughly
contemporary with the portrait of Piero mentioned
above. Bellini won the competition, but Pisanello stayed
on in Ferrara to focus, in particular, on the production of
all'antica medals that also satisfied the growing taste for
personal devices. Alberti's close relations with Leonello
and his court are well known (he dedicated the Teogenio
to Leonello29); his own portrait medal with accompanying
device seems closely related to Pisanello's experiments
of the early 1 440s, while he himself claimed that
Leonello had commissioned-or at least provided the
stimulus for-his writings on architecture.30
Unlike Leonello, Piero de' Medici did not have to
wait for his father's death to assume an active role in
cultural patronage. By 1444 construction began on a
grand new palace to house Cosimo's branch of the
Medici family, though not the descendants of his brother
Lorenzo. Piero was centrally involved with this project,
28. R. Sabbadini, s.v. "Guarino da Verona," Enciclopedia italiana
(Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1933), vol. 18, pp. 27-28;
Baxandall (see note 3), pp. 87-96.
29. Mancini (see note 8), p. 171
30. In the preface of the Ludi matematici, dedicated to Meliaduso
d'Este in 1452, Alberti mentions ". . . que'miei libri, de architettura,
quale io scrissi richiesto dallo illustrissimo mio signore, messer
Lionello...." This must refer to the treatise. See Grayson (see note 6),
pp. 152-163, esp. 156; V. Biermann, Ornamentum: Studien zum
Traktat 'De re aedificatoria' des Leon Battista Alberti (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1997), p. x. On Alberti's experiments with self
portraiture, see L. Syson, "Alberti e la ritrattistica," in Leon Battista
Alberti, ed. J. Rykwert and A. Engel (Milan: Electa, 1994), pp. 46-53.
44 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998
though it is generally assumed that his sphere of
responsibility was the interior furnishings, especially of
the main reception rooms that adjoined his own
apartment.3" Like his father, Piero had marked literary
interests; his sponsorship of Alberti's competition was
not the first documented association of the two men, for
Alberti had dedicated to Piero his De re uxoria, a minor
example of his voluminous writings on social issues.32
Alberti is of course far better known for his writings
on the visual arts, notably the celebrated treatise On
Painting, written in Latin and Italian versions in the mid the cathedral's local functions and connotations than to
1430s, shortly after the sentence of exile against the
Alberti family had been lifted by the Florentine
government and, for the first time in his life, Leon
Battista saw the city and palaces of his paternal
forefathers.33 In the preface of the Italian version, Alberti
includes a paean to the cathedral cupola, stressing
Brunelleschi's authorship of a project that, more than
anything else, marked an era of cultural renewal and,
through its size and prominence in the city, associated
this renewal with Florence.34 Alberti praises the cupola
as outstripping the achievements of antiquity, perhaps
mainly because of its much greater height and urban
presence than any extant Roman structure. The Gothic
character of the cupola is striking to modern observers,
31. This goes back to Gombrich's flat assertion of a division of
labor between Cosimo and his sons, the former reserving for himself
"the royal art of architecture"; see E. H. Gombrich, "The Early Medici
as Patrons of Art," in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the
Renaissance (London and New York: Phaidon, 1978), p. 46. For
subsequent discussion, see S. Zuraw, "The Medici Portraits of Mino da
Fiesole," in Piero de' Medici "il gottoso" (1416-1469): Kunst im
Dienste der Mediceer, ed. U. Beyer and B. Boucher (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1993), pp. 316, 330 n. 5.
32. This work, one of the Intercenali, exists both in Latin and in
vernacular versions. See C. Grayson, "Una intercenale inedita di Leon
Battista Alberti, 'Uxoria,"' Italia medievale e umanistica 3
(1 960):291-307; Ponte (see note 8), p. 17. For the dedication to Piero,
see Schweikhart (see note 1), pp. 369-371.
33. There is some evidence for a visit to Florence already in
1428; see Mancini (see note 8), p. 69; Bruschi (see note 5), p. 7. Some specifically with vernacular expression. Brunelleschi's
scholars discount or at least ignore it; for example, it is not mentioned cathedral cupola completed an ensemble of structures of
in the latest account of Alberti's career by the leading Alberti scholar,
Cecil Grayson. See C. Grayson, "Leon Battista Alberti: vita e opere," in
Leon Battista Alberti, ed. J. Rykwert and A. Engel (Milan: Electa, 1994),
pp. 28-37.
34. Leon Battista Alberti, "De pictura," in Opere volgari, vol. 3,
ed. C. Grayson (Bari and Rome: G. Laterza, 1973), pp. 7f. On possible
sources and contexts of Alberti's preface, see C. Smith, Architecture in
the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence,
1400-1470 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
pp. 19-53.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
but Quattrocento humanists lacked a critical vocabulary
and categorical framework adequate to articulate
discriminations between the style of the cathedral and
that, say, of the Pantheon.35 It is out of the question,
then, that the jurors of 1441 saw the cathedral in
general or the cupola in particular as an example of
"1vernacular style" in architecture, along the lines of
vernacular literature. They were, after all, members of
the papal secretariat and participants in the great Church
council; they were therefore perhaps less responsive to
its glorious role as the festive setting for the
proclamation of the unity of the eastern and western
churches, in the presence of the pope and patriarch. If
only temporarily, Santa Maria del Fiore had served both
as the center and, it would seem, an appropriate symbol
of a redefined Christendom.
Even if no specific connection was made between the
cathedral architecture and specifically vernacular
expression, the award of a literary prize to the cathedral
implied a more fundamental association, that between
the architecture of the cathedral or even architecture in
general-and verbal expression, at least of a suitably
lofty idiom, opening a range of possibilities for the
interanimation of diverse cultural domains. This was
nothing new, however, for when Florence cathedral was
(re)consecrated in 1436 by Eugenius IV, following the
completion of the cupola, the event had required and
generated verbal performances of various kinds. A
notable response was the speech delivered by Gianozzo
Manetti at the consecration, including a eulogy of the
building itself that, as C. W. Westfall has shown, in
many respects anticipates his famous description of
Nicholas V's project for St. Peter's.36
Manetti's eulogy of the cathedral was written, of
course, in an elevated humanist Latin, which may well
have seemed to him the only language appropriate to
such a task. There are other important reasons why the
cathedral architecture might not have been associated
which one, the Baptistry, was accepted as ancient, not
35. The issue is well discussed by Smith (see note 34), pp. 57-79.
36. C. W. Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti,
Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome,
1447-55 (University Park, Pennsylvania and London: Pennsylvania
State Press, 1 974), pp. 120f.; Battisti (see note 1 7), p. 122; Smith (see
note 34), p. 45.
 [3urroLI11s: (,rammar and expression in early Kenaissance architecture 45
least because of its association with the city's foundation
myths.37 The Baptistry is well known as the most
important single source for Brunelleschi's characteristic
architectural idiom, but it is likely that early-fourteenth
century observers of the whole cathedral complex saw
it not as a melange of distinct stylistic elements, but
rather as remarkably cohesive, a material expression of
the reinstitution in the fourteenth century, when most of
the cathedral was built and the cupola design
established, of the old claim of Florence to be the true
"daughter of Rome" and heir to Roman republican
values and prestige.38
The issue is more complex, however. The author of
the Protesta Alberti himself or someone very close to
the certame-claims to write on behalf of the people of
Florence, a formulation that recalls Alberti's offer of his
treatise On Friendship to the "senate and people" of the
city.39 It is impossible to miss Alberti's implicit
opposition of the learned elite and the solid citizenry
with values rooted in family and civic tradition, the kind
of men portrayed so sympathetically in his dialogs of the
1430s. In any case, Alberti planned a further certame,
this time dedicated to the theme of envy. The initiative
failed, in part because of scornful opposition by
influential humanists, notably Bruni, who suggested that
stupidity would be a more appropriate theme.40 Alberti,
however, had already taken sides. In his preface of 1436
to the Della Pittura, he explicitly champions
Brunelleschi, who, as Giovanni Tanturli has shown,
suffered the neglect or even disdain of the humanist
community until his posthumous effusive rehabilitation,
37. Onians (see note 15), p. 264, rather recklessly denies that
anyone other than a few humanists thought of the Baptistry as ancient.
This is to ignore the weight of political symbolism and ideological
constructions associated with the city's supposed Roman origin that
were widely diffused among the Florentine population, though
certainly manipulated by the elite on occasion. On the issue of origins
see following note.
38. W. Braunfels, Die mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst in der
Toskana, rev. ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979), pp. 131f.; C. Davis,
"Topographical and Historical Propaganda in Early Florentine
Chronicles and in Villani," Medioevo e Rinascimento 2 (1988):33-51;
N. Rubinstein, "II Poliziano e la questione delle origini di Firenze," in
11 Poliziano e il suo tempo. Atti del IV Congresso internazionale di
Studi sul Rinascimento (Florence: Sansoni, 1957), pp. 101-1 09.
39. The author of the Protesta claims to write on behalf of the
"plebe e i vulgari fiorentini"; see Gorni, "Certame coronario" (see note
8), p. 12; Tanturli (see note 23), p. 129.
40. In a letter to Leonardo Dati, Bruni wrote "sed michi videtur
longe plura dici posse adversus stulticiam quam adversus invidiam";
citation in Gorni, "Storia del certame"(see note 8), p. 149 n. 2.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
while the earliest recognition of his individual
achievement, as opposed to the cathedral as a
communal undertaking, came from vernacular circles,
specifically the notary Domenico da Prato.41
Brunelleschi's witty disparagement of the acid
tongued humanist Niccolo Niccoli was, in Tanturli's
view, revealing of his general attitude. This may also
explain the absence of any recorded response on his
part to the certame, which is not mentioned in Manetti's
biography.42 Unfortunately, as a result, we can hardly
even make a plausible guess regarding Brunelleschi's
estimation of the certame in particular or Alberti in
general. Brunelleschi, born in 1377, belonged to an
earlier generation than Alberti, born in 1404, and there
is no reason to assume close relations between them in
the relatively brief period (Brunelleschi died in 1446)
that this would have been possible. On the other hand,
they shared a friendship with the prominent
mathematician Toscanelli, who was interested in
mechanics and in technical problems involving the
practical application of mathematical knowledge.
Significantly, Brunelleschi's work on the cupola was
consistently described and praised, not least by Alberti
himself in 1436, as a technical rather than an
architectural achievement.43 Perhaps Alberti's estimation
of Brunelleschi was after all not so different from that of
other humanists.
Alberti's explicit interest in Brunelleschi's architecture
coincided, on the other hand, with his exploration of the
literary possibilities of the Florentine vernacular, which
led him into contact with a circle of acquaintances
distinct from and consciously opposed to the
humanists.44 In the early 1430s, a group interested in
the expressive possibilities of the local vernacular met in
the premises of the leading figure among them, the
barber Burchiello, who plied his trade in the Via
Calimaruzza, just off the Piazza della Signoria.
Burchiello was a noted practitioner of an exaggerated,
41. Tanturli (see note 23), pp. 125, 1 35.
42. Ibid., pp. 125f., 130.
43. As pointed out by Bruschi (see note 5), p. 39 n. 8; cf. Smith
(see note 34), pp. 27f.
44. It is worth recalling here Werner Raith's critique of the
scholarly tendency to represent humanism, in a totalizing way, as the
universal ideology of the period, rather than attending to "the organic
development of early capitalist Florentine society with its economic
and cultural foundations." See W. Raith, Florenz vor der Renaissance:
der Weg einer Stadt aus dem Mittelalter (Frankfurt and New York:
Campus-Verlag, 1979), p. 7.
 46 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998
inventive, and often bitingly sardonic, poetic version of
the vivid language-and sometimes the sheer sounds
of the Florentine streets and markets, a poetry indebted
to Dante but consciously opposed to the orthodoxies of
Petrarchism and humanism.45 It was an opposition
inscribed in the dense cultural topography of the city:
leading humanists would gather-a short walk from the
barber's shop-under the Tetto de' Pisani overlooking
the Piazza della Signoria.46
Burchiello's friends included Giovanni da Prato, an
amateur architect and student of optics who enters the
history of Florence cathedral dome through an
intemperate attack on Brunelleschi's design. The
exchange of poems between Giovanni and Brunelleschi
indicates that even if the former was Brunelleschi's
nemesis, the two men, both great admirers of Dante
(Giovanni da Prato lectured on Dante at the Florentine
university), sparred and fought within the same mental
or at least literary universe.47 Indeed, there is evidence
that Brunelleschi authored certain well-known and
pungent compositions in the vernacular and, further,
that he was at home in the contentious milieu of
Burchiello, in which few punches were pulled.48 But
can we imagine the elusive figure of Alberti among the
sharp wits and razors of Burchiello's shop, where we
know his friend and literary collaborator Leonardo Dati
was sometimes to be found?49 The overlap between
Alberti and the barber was in any case brief. Burchiello
left Florence in 1434, apprehensive of the consequences
of turning the sharp edge of his invective against the
Medici, whose treatment of potential rivals he despised,
and apparently fearing his outspokenness might even
cost him his life.50 There are striking allusions to
45. G. Patrizi, s. v. "Domenico di Giovanni, detto il Burchiello,"
Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 40 (Rome: Istituto della
Enciclopedia italiana, 1991), pp. 621-625. See also Tanturli (see note
23), pp. 126-129.
46. L. Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists,
1390-1460 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1 963),
p. 261. In the 1430s, this was the occasional meeting place of, among
others, Bruni, Niccoli, Marsuppini, Palmieri, and "occasionally"
Leon Battista Alberti.
47. Tanturli (see note 23), pp. 1 27f.; Battisti (see note 1 7),
pp. 321-327.
48. Tanturli (see note 23), p. 126, with bibliography; Battisti (see
note 1 7), pp. 326f. For the text, see Antonio Manetti, Vita di Filippo
Brunelleschi, ed. G. Tanturli (Milan: II Polifilo, 1976), pp. 1-44.
49. Mancini (see note 8), p. 138
50. This is the date given by Patrizi (see note 45), p. 621. If this is
correct (no specific source is cited, but this is the major monographic
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Burchiello's rash and vehement opposition to the Medici
in an exchange of verses with none other than Alberti,
presumably written very soon after the Medicean coup
of 1434, perhaps the year of Alberti's own return.51
In his sonnet, Alberti counsels the exasperated barber
to moderate his language or end badly. Style and
language ally Alberti with Burchiello and his friends
probably including Brunelleschi, whose relations with
the Medici were cool-but the content asserts distance
from their political views or rather, perhaps, from the
vehement espousal of any political view. Nevertheless,
the Florentine Burchiello surely occupies a place of
honor among the satirists, notably the ancient Greek
Lucian, who inspired Alberti to indulge his own parodic
and sardonic vein, especially in the Momus, written in a
humanistic Latin no less grand than that of the roughly
contemporary De re aedificatoria but, however subtly,
subjecting the papal court or any court-to savage
satire.52 Alberti's final work in the vernacular before
leaving Florence in 1443 was the dialog Profugiorum de
aerumnis, usually dated in the year following the
certame. This includes an extended passage in which, as
Christine Smith has pointed out, Alberti himself employs
the cupola not only as the setting of an imagined
conversation, but also as a metaphor for the soul to
illustrate a central theme of the work, the blessedness of
a calm space untroubled by the vicissitudes of the
world.53 The passage echoes the evocation in the De re
aedificatoria of the sanctuary of a temple as a place
entirely suffused with philosophy (a term that, when
used by Alberti, is always laden with Stoic ethical
values) and where architecture, rather than painting or
treatment of Burchiello's life), the assumption of certain authors that
Alberti was a regular visitor to Burchiello's shop cannot be upheld;
cf. Gadol (see note 23), p. 217.
51. For the single poem now attributed securely to Alberti and
one of Burchiello's poems in return, see Alberti (see note 8), no. 1,
pp. 3-7. See also Mancini (see note 8), p. 139; Tanturli (see note 23),
p. 128; Patrizi (see note 45), p. 622.
52. On Burchiello's characterization of Alberti as a "legulaio," see
Gorni's note in Alberti (see note 8), p. 3. For the text of the Momus,
see L. B. Alberti, Momo o del principe, ed. R. Consolo (Genoa: Costa
& Nolan, 1986). For an excellent discussion of the dialog in the
context of anticourt literature, see G. Gorni (see note 22), pp.
250-252. On the contrast between the savage satire of the Momus and
the implicit or explicit optimism of the technical and social writings,
including the treatise on architecture, see L. A. Begliomini, "Note
sull'opera dell'Alberti: il 'Momus' e il 'De re aedificatoria,"
Rinascimento, ser. 2, 26 (1972):267-283.
53. Smith (see note 34), pp. 80-97, notes that this is a "unique
example of extended architectural description in his work."
 Burroughs: (C,r:mmar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 47
even sculpture, takes over as the vehicle of the
expression of the profoundest values of a culture.54
This all seems far removed from the most typical
literary interests of Burchiello and his circle. However,
these included a particular enthusiasm for Dante, which
we know was shared both by Brunelleschi and, much
later, by his biographer, Antonio Manetti, whose visual
reconstruction of Dante's infernal topography and
architecture surely derives from a current of discussion
and speculation to which Brunelleschi contributed.55
Moreover, Alberti's evocation of the cathedral as a Stoic
soul resonates with the lively late-medieval tradition of
allegorical architecture, which, as it happens, is
especially prominent in vernacular poetry and which
Dante developed in his great vernacular poem.56
In the profugiorum ab aerumnis, then, Alberti drew
on and enriched a theme in vernacular culture that
perhaps already in 1441 informed responses to the
cathedral, even on the part of the certame jury. In any
case, it is evident that Alberti brought both technical and
moral concerns to bear in his early meditations on
architecture and even in his own early exercises in
architectural design. In the Profugiorum ab aerumnis, he
recounts his own experiments in architectural design
and even "construction," conducted in his imagination,
he says, to assuage insomnia occasioned by excitement
of mind and associated with consideration of
mathematical problems, especially those of some
practical relevance.57 The latter category presumably
includes experiments in the graphic representation of
architecture, possibly working out the implications of
the architectural innovations current in the Florentine
milieu of the early 1440s. Still, there is a considerable
distance from a literary and ethical discourse that uses
architectural examples and analogies, however centrally,
to an architecture-or the conception of an architecture
that itself assumes the expression and communication of
fundamental ethical and cultural values.
This is the crucial step taken with the De re
aedificatoria, written following Alberti's departure from
54. Alberti, De re aedificatoria Vll.1 0: "Sed velim in templis cum
pariete tum et pavimento nihil adsit, quod meram philosophiam non
sapiat." See Orlandi and Portoghesi (see note 2), 2:610/61 1; cf.
Rykwert, Tavernor, and Leach (see note 2), p. 220.
55. Battisti (see note 17), p. 321.
56. J. Mann, "Allegorical Buildings in Medieval Literature,"
Medium Aevum 63 (1 994):1 91-21 0.
57. Bonucci, ed., Opere volgari (Florence: Galileiana, 1843),
1:127f.; cf. Grayson (see note 6), p. 157; Smith (see note 53), p. 13.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Florence in 1443 and his transfer to a more exclusively
latinate milieu. The concern with clarity of exposition in
the language of the treatise itself, however, and the
author's explicit concern with the possibilities of
architecture as a vehicle of ethical motivation and
stimulus indicate the persistence of themes shaped by
Alberti's exposure and responses to a range of linguistic
practices and architectural idioms in the 1430s and
early 1440s. The evident appeal in the treatise to
patrons, rather than to such architects as existed at the
time, clearly evokes the relations Alberti enjoyed in the
early 1440s with aristocratic amateurs and future
patrons of architecture such as Piero de' Medici and
Leonello d'Este.58 By now, Alberti was not only a literary
man of some reputation, but also an advisor and
confidant of princes and public figures. Such a role was
surely confirmed by Piero de' Medici's sponsorship of
the certame.
III
A central theme in recent, self-consciously innovative
accounts of early Renaissance architecture is the
contrast between Brunelleschi and Alberti (figs. 1-2),
whatever the latter's debt to the former. Some see the
contrast in terms of a version of an opposition between
Brunelleschi's adherence to medieval models, however
rationalized, and Alberti's classicism: an opposition, in
other words, of a vernacular Brunelleschi and a latinate
and often aulic Alberti, who after all largely both wrote
about architecture and produced designs for and at
princely courts.59 The conception of a medieval
58. Alberti dedicated the De equo animante to Leonello in circa
1444 and the Ludi matematici to Mediaduso; Ponte (see note 8), p. 75.
59. A medieval Brunelleschi is presented by H. Klotz, Filippo
Brunelleschi: The Early Works and the Medieval Tradition (New York:
Rizzoli, 1990) (This is the English edition of Klotz's book of 1967,
without updating.); Saalman (see note 4); H. Burns, "Quattrocento
Architecture and the Antique: Some Problems," in Classical Influences
on European Culture, ed. R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1 971), pp. 269ff. On the contrast
between Brunelleschi and Alberti, see Burns, "Un disegno
architettonico di Alberti e la questione del rapporto fra Brunelleschi ed
Alberti," in Filippo Brunelleschi: la sua opera e il suo tempo, ed. Pina
Ragionieri (Florence: Centro Di, 1980), pp. 105-124, in which Burns
claims to be "revolutionary" in his insistence on the difference of
principle between the two architects, both of whom he sees as
innovators, though in the case of Brunelleschi, from a traditionalist
position. Burns's emphasis on Alberti as emulator of antiquity neglects
his openness to medieval deformations; on which see, e.g., G. C.
Argan, s.v. "Leon Battista Alberti," Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 1
48 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998

Figure 1. Filippo Brunelleschi, Foundling Hospital, Florence, facade. Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, New
York.

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Burroughs: Grammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 49

Figure 2. Leon Battista Alberti, Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, facade.

Courtesy of Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York.

Brunelleschi hardly does justice to his radical
rationalism, though it is certainly true that Brunelleschi
was rooted in the intense civic and corporate world of
late-medieval Florence, as Diane Zervas above all has
demonstrated.
Brunelleschi's place in such a milieu and, in the
longer view, the milieu itself were placed in question,
however, by external factors, notably, as Zervas has
shown, his exclusion from political office following the
Medici coup.60 No less disruptive to the institutional
(Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960), p. 710. Burns's
characterization of Alberti's architectural classicism can be now
usefully read through the prism of a postmodernist conception of
Alberti's literary classicism; see A. Grafton, "Panofsky, Alberti, and the
Ancient World," in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside,
ed. I. Lavin (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995),
pp. 123-130. For all the irony and intertextuality, however, Alberti was
far from postmodern in his moral stance; see R. Cardini, Mosaici: il
uNemico/ dell'Alberti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990).
60. D. F. Zervas, "Filippo Brunelleschi's Political Career,"
Burlington Magazine 121 (1979):630-639.
structures among which Brunelleschi flourished, on the
other hand, were his own repeated challenges to the
status quo in the name of individual artistic and/or
administrative control. Although there is no explicit
mention of Brunelleschi in the De re aedificatoria,
Alberti leaves no doubt that he recognized the
significance of his achievement, not only for the
emergence of a new formal language of architecture, but
also-more radical still-for the inauguration of a new
epoch in the design process and in the professional
status of the architect.
In my view, Brunelleschi's approach to architecture
was indeed medieval in crucial respects and as such
differed drastically from that of Alberti. For all the
documented engagement of Brunelleschi with
vernacular culture, however, a characterization of the
difference between Brunelleschi and Alberti as that
between vernacular and classical or learned forms of
expression would be erroneous. Alberti, of course,
moved between vernacular and classical models and

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
50 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998

vehicles of expression with a flexibility entirely foreign tended to be doctors of law and hailed from a higher
to Brunelleschi. More importantly, however, social milieu than most notaries. Many notaries also
Brunelleschi's architecture cannot be understood in attended university, however, though often not so much
terms of any aspect of vernacular usage, but rather in for legal as for rhetorical training, especially as
terms of a domain of Latin usage and latinate culture humanism filtered through the culture.62 Certainly, some
outside Alberti's experience, both by virtue of the major early humanists were notaries, notably the first
milieus in which he moved and in the wake of larger humanist chancellor of Florence, Coluccio Salutati, and
historical shifts. all his successors-including Leonardo Bruni, Poggio
This specific latinate culture, which in general was Bracciolini, and Carlo Marsuppini-until the
slow to embrace the exotic-and sometimes alarmingly appointment of the doctor of law Benedetto Accolti in
erotic predilections of humanism, was grounded in 1458 set a new precedent.63 Unlike Salutati or Bruni,
pedagogical and professional structures and processes the Florentine notariate was predominantly native to the
that constituted a significant aspect of Brunelleschi's city and wholly or largely trained within its walls. The
formative environment but were already in retreat by the evidence bears out an early-fifteenth-century
time of Alberti's sojourn in Florence. It was shaped by observation that Florence was the source of notaries just
the formalization and systematization of linguistic usage as Bologna was the source of doctors of law.64
through grammar, and of human behavior and The son of a prominent notary, Brunelleschi was born
interaction through legal provisions and prescriptions. in 1 377, one year before the appointment of Salutati as
The links between grammar and law were close, since chancellor.65 His family situation guaranteed his
grammatical instruction-the "grammar school" was a absorption, in his youth, in a distinctively notarial
necessary prelude to the most accessible level of the culture, in the apt phrase of Peter Burke.66 Among the
legal profession, the notariate. But notarial writing-still known habitues of Burchiello's barbershop salon, there
largely in Latin-depended on models of usage and were many notaries, notably Domenico da Prato,
assumptions about language itself that were widely identified by Tanturli as the first to give literary
diffused in late-medieval urban societies and ultimately
depended on scholastic models and styles of explanation
62. For developments in the higher study of law, see R. J. Schoek,
that, at least in Italy, soon withered with the victory of "Humanism and Jurisprudence," in Renaissance Humanism:
humanism. As Ian Maclean has pointed out, moreover, Foundations, Forms and Legacy. Vol. 3, Humanism in the Disciplines,
Renaissance legal theorists often devoted extended ed. A. Rabil (Philadelphia: Universtiy of Pennsylvania Press, 1988),
introductory discussions to the theme of grammar, with pp. 310-313.
63. For Accolti's appointment, see D. Hay and J. Law, Italy in the
the evident awareness that traditional grammar was not
Age of the Renaissance (New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 293f. Accolti,
conceived in terms "ideal for their purposes." 61 who taught law at the Florentine Studium from 1435, was evidently
In the intensely litigious climate of late-medieval associated with Alberti, since he participated in the certame of 1441;
Florence, notaries were ubiquitous and indispensable. see A. Petrucci, s.v. "Benedetto Accolti," Dizionario biografico degli
Of the "greater guilds" that controlled republican Italiani 1 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960), p. 99. On
an exemplary ascent from "provincial notary" to intellectual and
Florence, preeminence was traditionally assigned to the
political leader, see R. G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life,
Guild of Judges and Notaries (Giudici e Notai). Notaries Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, North Carolina:
formed by far the larger contingent within the guild, and Duke University Press, 1983).
recent studies have emphasized the importance of 64. D'Addario (see note 61), p. 26, no. 7, quoting Goro Dati.
notaries in every aspect of the life of the city. Judges 65. On Ser Brunellesco di Lippo (d. 1402), see U. Procacci, "Chi
era Filippo di ser Brunellesco?" in Filippo Brunelleschi: la sua opera e
il suo tempo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence: Centro Di, 1980), vol. 1,
61. I. Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: p. 39; D'Addario (see note 61), p. 255; according to D'Addario, no
The Case of Law (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University systematic study has yet been undertaken concerning the professional
Press, 1992), pp. 69-71. On the status and activities of the different characteristics of families engaged in the arts, but he lists Brunelleschi
branches of the legal profession in Florence, see L. Martines, Lawyers and Masaccio among a limited number of important figures for whom
and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, New Jersey: the link was significant.
Princeton University Press, 1968); A. D'Addario et al., eds., I/ notaio 66. P. Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy
nella civilta florentina (Florence: Vallecchi, 1985). On the wider (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1 13,
context, see P. Grossi, L'ordine giuridico medievale (Bari and Rome: 128. Burke estimates that in Florence in 1427, notaries made up eight
Laterza, 1995). per 1,000 of the population.

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 BuLrroughs C(rammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 51
recognition to Brunelleschi's architectural
achievement.67 Given the importance of the
conveyance, division, improvement, and protection of
private and institutional real property in late-medieval
Florence, numerous notaries no doubt developed a
degree of architectural expertise, including the matching
of language to buildings and spaces, as well as to the
processes affecting them. Such skills were perhaps
invaluable in the sophisticated but-at least in literary
formats unarticulated patterns of urban design recently
reconstructed by Friedman and Trachtenberg.68
The "notarial culture" of late-medieval Florence was
grounded in patterns of education and professional
preparation that presupposed certain fundamental habits
of thought and cognitive frameworks. I have discussed
elsewhere the shift from a prehumanist notarial culture,
associated with oligarchic republicanism and the
beginnings of civic humanism, to an increasingly
centralized and consensual political culture marked by
ultimately Platonizing conceptions of legitimacy, and
with far-reaching implications for the built
environment.69 Here I wish to focus on shifting notions
of the nature of language or at least on practices
symptomatic of such shifts, especially with regard to the
formulation and communication of rules for language
learning and prose composition.
We have looked at the complex relationship of both
Brunelleschi and Alberti to the issue of literary
expression in the vernacular, and at Alberti's project for
its reform. Although comfortably immersed in a rich and
frequently combative vernacular culture, Brunelleschi,
as an architect, implemented a radically reductive and
rationalist method that cannot be associated with his
specifically vernacular background. Indeed, there is a
noteworthy contrast between his insistence on
authorship in his work as architect or technical expert
and the fluidity of authorial designation in the early
67. Tanturli (see note 23), pp. 125f. Another notary who figures in
Tanturli's account is ser Niccolo Tinucci (ibid.).
68. D. Friedman, Florentine New Towns: Urban Design in the
Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988); M.
Trachtenberg, "What Brunelleschi Saw: Monument and Site at the
Palazzo Vecchio in Florence," Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 47 (1988):14-44; id., Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art,
and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
69. C. Burroughs, "Spaces of Arbitration and the Organization of
Space in Late-Medieval Italian Cities," in Medieval Practices of Space,
ed. B. Hanawalt and M. Kobialka (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
history of the famous Tale of the Fat Carpenter, generally
attributed to Brunelleschi.70 Brunelleschi's technical and
mathematical interests are clearly part of the story, but
the most compelling accounts of his method point to his
concern with developing an architectural syntax or
grammar (terms that recur with some frequency, though
without exploration of their implications).71 Implicitly,
such studies introduce a reference to architecture not
just as language as a communicative practice, but as a
discipline organized analogously to language and
anchored in a structure a "grammar" underlying and
enabling all forms of verbal enunciation. For late
twentieth-century readers, such a distinction irresistibly
recalls the semiology of de Saussure and his followers,
but it was also anticipated in medieval thinking about
language and in the institutional matrix and purposes of
second-language acquisition.
For Brunelleschi, in my view, the Latin of notarial
culture provided a foundation, if not indeed a model, for
the elaboration of a reformed architecture as an
analogous and no less rigorous case of a "language"
anchored by a grammar. Late-medieval notarial culture
was formed and maintained by a deeply rooted system
of pedagogy. Notaries received their instruction, for the
most part, in grammar school. Although many notaries
advanced their careers by adopting more or less
classical Latin, it was general practice to rely on
formularies, the artes dictaminis used in fairly
standardized form all over Latin Europe.72 In many ways
these were simple handbooks to be mined for forms of
70. On this and on the novella Geta e Birria, see Tanturli (see
note 23), pp. 126f., 135.
71. At the beginning of his article, "Prima del Brunelleschi: verso
un'architettura sintattica e prospettica," Palladio, ser. 3, 27
(1 978):47-76, Arnaldo Bruschi identifies four fundamental principles
of Brunelleschi's architecture: perspectival organization, proportion,
uniformity of both simple and compound elements, and the syntactic
association of "lexical" elements in an integrated design ("sintatticita").
Bruschi gives particular emphasis to the last, which he claims has been
relatively neglected in previous scholarship. In a related article of the
same year, to which I am much indebted, Bruschi contrasts the basic
principles of Brunelleschi's and Alberti's architecture; see "Note sulla
formazione architettonica dell'Alberti," Palladio, ser. 3, 25
(1 978):6-44. Here Bruschi argues that though Brunelleschi may have
used elements of ancient derivation, his design method is largely new
and anchored in medieval rather than ancient culture (he doesn't
specify architecture) (p. 33). This is absolutely right but raises the
question of where in medieval culture to locate the source or origin
both of Brunelleschi's specific method and of his conception of
method or methodicity as such.
72. Hay and Law (see note 63), p. 289; P. 0. Kristeller, "Rhetoric
in Medieval and Renaissance Culture," in Renaissance E/oquence:
 52 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998

language to suit particular circumstances. Their use known as modistae through their use of the term modus
enabled and encouraged, as Paul Grendler points out, to characterize links between existence, understanding,
the production of formal letters emphasizing harmonious and language. "In speculative grammar, the structure of
relationships between members of a social hierarchy.73 reality is the ultimate foundation of grammar. Real things
Grendler finds correspondence of this type, even exist and possess various qualities or modes of being.
between friends, depersonalized and lacking emotion Words are surface manifestations of reality and reflect
and meditation on personal affairs. Humanists found an the way the mind comprehends reality." This linking of
excellent model for such writing in the letters of Cicero grammar to reality entailed a rigid conception of
ad familiares, which indeed were to become an language that was no more congenial to humanists than,
important textbook in the humanist pedagogical regime in the late twentieth century, structuralist accounts of
that quickly cut a swathe in early-fifteenth-century deep grammars have been to postmodern critics.
Italy.74 We can also now see why Alberti's discussion of Grendler's characterization of speculative grammar
friendship, though couched in the vernacular, in fact serves remarkably well as an analytical description of
represented as much a challenge to the prevailing Brunelleschi's architecture. This is a stripped-down,
"notarial culture" as any magniloquent display of hierarchical system of elements-akin to the membri e
Ciceronian Latin. Implicit within the simplest osse discerned by Brunelleschi, according to his
formularies was a theory of grammar that resonated with biographer, in the remains of Roman architecture76
medieval doctrine about the nature of language as arrayed in a rationally regulated and ordered space and
taught and discussed at major universities. Grendler has marking out a bounded volume within it. The
aptly characterized the ars dictaminis as exemplifying Brunelleschian architectural syntax (for which,
"the typical medieval tendency to organize and classify significantly, the technical term was constructio)77 is
an intellectual activity according to logical and
hierarchical principles." A corollary of this is "the n. 51. See also 1. Rosier, La grammaire speculative des Modistes (Lille:
preference for preceptive method based on rules rather Presses universitaires de Lille, 1983); C. Marmo, Semiotica e
than on imitation, which was favored by humanists." linguaggio nella scolastica-Parigi, Bologna, Erfurt, 1270-1330: la
semiotica dei Modisti (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo,
Grendler relates this to the favor shown by fourteenth
1994); Jensen (see note 74), p. 67. On speculative grammar in relation
century grammarians to speculative grammar, "an to philosophy and pedagogy in Italy, see Grendler (see note 72),
attempt to base language on a logic of meaning." pp. 115-117, 164f.
Speculative grammar was so called because it adhered 76. Manetti (see note 48), p. 65; cf. Tanturli (see note 23), p. 129.
to a conception of grammar as a mirror (speculum) of Manetti reports of Brunelleschi's architectural studies in Rome that
"parvegli conoscere un certo ordine di membri e d'ossa." In Manetti
the structure of the universe.75 Its practitioners were
(see note 48), p. 65 n. 1, Giovanni Tanturli suggests that this
formulation is derived from Alberti's use of anatomical analogies,
especially involving "bones" and "ligaments," in the De re
Studies in the Theory and Practice of Medieval Rhetoric, ed. J. J. aedificatoria; see the appendix on "Bones and paneling" in Rykwert,
Murphy (Berkeley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1983), Tavernor, and Leach (see note 2), p. 421. But Alberti generally uses this
pp. 6f.; P. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, language to refer to structural properties of walls and roofs that are
Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 1 1 4f. largely covered by a "skin" or surface treatment; in other words, he
73. Grendler (see note 72), p. 221. describes the typical Roman method of building with concrete
74. K. Jensen, "The Humanist Reform of Latin and Latin reinforced by brick masonry. This is very different from the visible
Teaching," in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, membering of Brunelleschi's architecture, or indeed from Alberti's
ed. J. Kraye (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, own, somewhat inconsistent reference to columns as bones at De re
1 996), p. 73, notes, however, that Cicero's letters were not widely aedificatoria IX.5 (Rykwert, Tavernor, and Leach [see note 2], p. 303;
used until the end of the fifteenth century. On the other hand, the Orlandi and Portoghesi [see note 2], vol. 2, pp. 81 8/81 9). Significantly,
letters of early-fifteenth-century Florentine humanists clearly indicate Alberti refers here to Nature, not antiquity, as the model. I believe,
the adoption of new protocols of letter writing, as in the cases of then, that Manetti recalls Brunelleschi's, not Alberti's, way of
Ambrogio Traversari or Poggio Bracciolini. On humanist primers on characterizing architectural membering, one applied by the former to
letter writing, see Kristeller (see note 72), p. 10. his own principle of architectural design for which, perhaps, he
75. Because of its obvious resonances with modern theories of claimed ancient precedent.
universal grammar (Chomsky, etc.), there has been considerable recent 77. Gehl (see note 1 5), p. 1 00, discusses treatises on syntax (De
interest in the modistae, as is pointed out by G. L. Bursill-Hall, constructione), some designed as textbooks, others as reference works.
Speculative Grammars of the Middle Ages: The Doctrine of the Partes On syntactic analysis as a branch of speculative grammar, see R. H.
Orationis of the Modistae (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1977), p. 27 Robins, "Functional Syntax in Medieval Europe," in Studies in

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Kurroughs. C rarmar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 53
composed of highly uniform and regular elements linked
together in a systematic and coherent articulation that
seems to conform to and embody transcendent
principles of the ordering of things, exactly on the lines
of the linguistic elements that mirror, in modistic theory,
the structure of reality. It was not only an aesthetic
concern that led Brunelleschi to negate walls as
constituent elements of architecture, as he did already, if
not entirely successfully, in the Old Sacristy.78
The question arises, however, of the knowledge of or
interest in modistic theory in late-medieval Florence.
After all, speculative grammar emerged and flourished in
the scholastic environment of Northern European
schools, though Bologna quickly became a leading
center.79 As is often noted, in Italy the stress was always
more on rhetorical performance than on logical analysis,
especially with the diffusion of humanist priorities and
principles. Nevertheless, the impact of modistic theory
in Italy was far from negligible, and its traces in Italian
intellectual culture have been acknowledged especially
by Grendler, who demonstrates that significant features
of philosophical grammar survived well into the fifteenth
century, even in the writings on grammar of certain
leading humanists, like Guarino.80
Grendler does not directly address the situation in
Florence. The teaching of grammar in late-medieval
Florence has been the focus of recent scholarly
attention, most notably that of Paul Gehl, who has
written extensively on the early stages of pedagogical
Medieval Linguistic Thought, ed. K. Koerner, H. J. Niederle, and R. H.
Robins (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1980), pp. 231-240.
Robins stresses the retention by Renaissance grammarians of many
features of medieval syntactic analysis (e.g., the relationship of
government of one part by another), in spite of their rejection of the
philosophical framework (p. 237).
78. Volker Hoffmann convincingly identifies the probable source
of this approach to architectural design in the canopylike, that is, wall
less, structures represented in the mosaics in the Baptistry, as well as in
the membering of that building itself, the symbol and embodiment of a
continuous tradition of Florentine romanitas. See V. Hoffmann,
"L'origine del sistema architettonico del Brunelleschi," in Filippo
Brunelleschi: la sua opera e il suo tempo, ed. Pina Ragionieri
(Florence: Centro Di, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 447-457.
79. Marmo (see note 75), pp. 5-12, lists the major modistae and
their writings. Leading figures based at Bologna include Gentile da
Cingoli and Angelo d'Arezzo.
80. Grendler (see note 72), p. 165. M. Becker, Civility and Society
in Western Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1 988), p. 1 75 n. 20, relates the persistence of speculative
grammar to that of etymology, which was grounded in a belief that
"words reflected reality in their composition." He notes that even
Salutati was slow to abandon etymological thinking.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
initiation into Latin.81 In addition to its obvious practical
significance, Gehl argues for the cultural importance of
latinization in the production of a new kind of subject,
formed through the moral messages contained in many
of the texts but even more through the acquisition of
Latin itself. Bilingualism not only gave students a
different, more self-conscious apprehension of
vernacular linguistic expression; more importantly, as
Gehl emphasizes, it introduced them, for the first time,
to grammatical analysis, which in itself was thought to
have moral value.82
Perhaps because of his emphasis on the moral rather
than epistemological dimension of his subject, Gehl
does not mention speculative grammar as such. He
points out that grammar was a matter both of
elementary instruction-his particular concern-and of
university education, without addressing the nature of
the latter or its relationship to the former.83 However, he
outlines a two-step pedagogical process in elementary
schooling, in which students moved from basic
handbooks to primers on syntax (constructio). Such
primers did not explicitly address or embody modistic
theory, though they clearly shared certain basic
assumptions of the modistae. I have found no specific
evidence that engagement with such primers led in
exceptional cases to an interest in philosophical
grammar, but this would have been a reasonable
course for students concerned about the philosophical
as opposed to the moral legitimation of a cultural
process that guaranteed both professional opportunity
and access to-indeed the instrumentalization of-a
foundational ontological realm but was already
endangered by new cultural developments and their
institutional implications.84
81. Gehl (see note 1 5), esp. pp. 82-106. Gehl's emphasis on the
moral aspect of grammar teaching-against the background, once
again, of historiographical debate about the emergence and diffusion
of "civic humanism"-inhibits consideration of what might be called
the epistemological dimension of the cultural practices Gehl discusses.
Gehl's work is philologically outstanding, but methodologically
circumscribed.
82. Ibid., pp. 102-1 04.
83. Gehl, ibid., p. 229, notes a distinction between writing
masters and grammar teachers. The latter were more respectable, no
doubt because writing masters often taught (in) the vernacular, while
grammar enjoyed the prestige both of the Latin language and of the
background of grammatical theory. The "marginalization of Latin
grammatical study" is a major theme of Gehl, ibid., e.g., p. 232.
84. For an excellent summary of the literature, see Jensen (see
note 74).
 54 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998
The humanist attack on medieval pedagogy came
early, especially in the form of numerous grammatical
writings, all of which-in contrast to Alberti's later
Tuscan grammar-dealt exclusively with the analysis of
Latin.85 In Grendler's view, the decade 141 0-1 420 was
crucial in the elaboration of new ways of thinking about
grammar. A key text was a handbook written circa 1418
by Guarino da Verona, the Regulae grammaticales,
distinguished less by the active adoption of a new
methodology than by the employment of classical
terminology and by a reductive presentation of the
material.86 After all, it was a tenet of humanism, even if
unarticulated at first, that grammatical study was only a
required step, as brief as possible, toward full
engagement with a language in the texts themselves.87
This is the position represented by Alberti himself in
the Della Famiglia, in which he recommends the
pedagogical use of selected works on grammar, but only
ancient ones and then only as long as it takes until a
student can tackle literary and historical masterpieces.88
Typically, for humanists, it was usage that mattered;
indeed, in itself grammar was utterly trivial, certainly in
contrast to the elucidation and illustration of a literary
language, as in Lorenzo Valla's Libri elegantiarum
linguae latinae, which includes an unusually explicit
and blistering polemic against medieval grammar and in
85. Grendler (see note 72), p. 1 69; W. K. Percival, "The
Grammatical Tradition and the Rise of the Vernaculars," in Current
Trends in Linguistics, ed. T. A. Sebeok (The Hague and Paris: Mouton,
1963-1976), vol. 13, pp. 231-275; id., "Renaissance Grammar:
Rebellion or Evolution?" in Interrogativi dell'umanesimo, ed. G. A.
Tarugi (Florence: Olschki, 1 976), vol. 2, pp. 73-90, esp.73-77; id.,
"Changes in the Approach to Language," in Cambridge History of Later
Medieval Philosophy, ed. N. Kretzman, A. Kenny, and J. Pinburg
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.
808-81 6; Jensen (see note 74), p. 66. Percival distinguishes three
phases in the development of grammatical writing from the mid
fourteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. The first is the survival of
medieval characteristics; the second involves tentative innovation but
without explicit reflection on the changes being made (as in the case
of Guarino); the third, embodied especially by Lorenzo Valla, involves
not just explicit but even vehement antagonism to medieval grammar.
Valla's approach was perhaps too radical to gain early acceptance; the
first grammarian to follow Val la's lead was Giovanni Sulpizio Verulano,
editor of the first printed text of Vitruvius (see below).
86. Jensen (see note 74), p. 66.
87. Ibid., p. 71.
88. Alberti counsels the learning of grammar from Priscian and
Servius, before moving to Cicero, Livy, and Sallust; see Alberti (see
note 19), p. 86; cf. Watkins (see note 14), p. 82. Alberti notes,
interestingly, that Cicero himself was educated by a family friend who
was also a distinguished jurist; see Alberti (see note 19), p. 66.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
which Valla perhaps took the radical step to a
conventional view of language.89
Not long before he produced his grammar, Guarino
da Verona had spent some years in Florence, where he
remained well known. His pedagogy, aiming at the
production of well-rounded gentlemen of broad cultural
interests and expertise, may have had a particular effect
on Piero de' Medici, who may have been his student
and would certainly have been acquainted with the man
and his ideas through Leonello d'Este.90 Grendler relates
the new ideas about the teaching of grammar to the
development of classicizing script types by Florentine
intellectuals, notably Niccolo Niccoli, cast by
Vespasiano and others as a paradigmatic connoisseur
and collector of antiquities.91
In a famous essay, Ernst Gombrich claims that the
research of Niccoli and others into ancient Roman
epigraphy and their interest in its adaptive revival
inspired and directed the "reform of the arts." 92
Gombrich separates currents in artistic expression from
social and ideological tendencies, a separation that can
hardly be upheld in this case in the light of Tanturli's
demonstration of the particular disdain of Niccoli for
artifices (artisans) and in particular for Brunelleschi, an
attitude characteristic of humanism in general, at least
until Brunelleschi's death.93 No direct connection
89. Jensen (see note 74), p. 69, cites a sixteenth-century
distinction between the teaching of grammar and the teaching of
language, leading to the claim that students of language had long been
badly served by subjection to too much of the latter. Jensen shows
how this attitude, perhaps less trenchantly expressed, can be traced
back into the early fifteenth century. On Valla, see also Grendler (see
note 72), p. 1 69, and for the hypothesis of a breakthrough by Valla to a
conventional theory of language, R. Waswo, Language and Meaning in
the Renaissance (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1987). The controversy occasioned by Waswo's hypothesis is well
discussed by Maclean (see note 61), pp. 3, 132. For medieval
conventionalist thinking, see T. Maloney. "Roger Bacon on the
Significatum of Words," in Arch6ologie du signe, ed. L. Brind'Amour
and E. Vance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 1 90
(language as "a set of arbitrary symbols [and which] thereby
transcends the restrictive bonds of natural signification"). Bacon's
underlying concern was with free will (p. 210).
90. F. Ames-Lewis, "Domenico Veneziano and the Medici as Art
Patrons," Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 21 (1 979):76f., 82.
91. Grendler (see note 72), p. 169.
92. Gombrich (see note 31), pp. 35-57.
93. Tanturli (see note 23), p. 125. Tanturli begins with a quip
delivered, as the evidence indicates, by Brunelleschi at Niccoli's
expense. Niccoli had charged the architect with being a philosopher
without books. Brunelleschi, mindful of Niccoli's acquisitiveness,
retorted that the latter was nothing but books without a philosopher.
 Burroughs: ( rammar and expression in earilv Renaissance architecture 533
between grammatical and architectural theory can be
discerned in Florentine circles. It is significant, however,
that the editor of the first printed version of Vitruvius
(Rome, circa 1486), Sulpizio da Veroli, was also the
author of an important, somewhat polemical early
humanist grammar (written circa 1485). Sulpizio also
produced a verse guide to table manners, marked by an
almost Albertian linking of concerns with conduct and
with aesthetic and social form.94
Alberti's position vis-a-vis both the humanist and
vernacular literary movements of 1430s Florence was
cautious. Already before his arrival in Florence, he had
made a name for himself in humanist circles for his
production of a Latin comedy that could and did pass
for an ancient text. Alberti developed his literary
inclinations during.and at the expense of his university
studies. Nevertheless, he completed the curriculum at
the University of Bologna, the most prestigious law
school on the peninsula, with a degree in canon law.95
His legal training facilitated his entry into the papal
chancery and provided the basis for a little-known work,
De iure (On Law/lJustice), of 1437.96 The question of the
relevance of Alberti's study of law for his various
intellectual projects is complicated by the emergence, at
least from the early fifteenth century, of humanist legal
theory. As in other fields, humanists studied legal codes
and systems as the products of particular historical
moments and focused attention on the recovery of early
or even original legal texts.97
A version of the story, in which Niccoli's tormenter is not named, is
told by the humanist Guarini, who spent some time in Florence as a
teacher of Greek. The architect is named only in a vernacular version
of the story.
94. For the Vitruvius edition and Sulpizio's place in the humanist
circle around Pomponio Leto, see L. Marcucci, "Giovanni Sulpicio e la
prima edizione del De Architectura di Vitruvio," Studi e documenti di
architettura 8 (1 978):1 85-1 95; on his other activities, see Jensen (see
note 74), pp. 71 f.
95. Martines (see note 46), p. 143.
96. Mancini (see note 8), pp. 142-145; he calls it "un opuscolo di
straordinaria importanza" (p. 142). Mancini used the text published in
Alberti, Opera (Florence, 1499[?]). For all its anticipatory brilliance,
the work seems not to have been subsequently published or even cited
in scholarship on Alberti (e.g., Gadol [see note 23]).
97. An important monument of this tendency was A. Fiocchi, De
magistratibus sacerdotibusque Romanorum, written in 1443, cited by
H. Muhlmann, Asthetische Theorie der Renaissance: Leon Battista
Alberti (Bonn: Habelt, 1 981), p. 61. Muhimann suggests that
Fiocchi's legal studies and Alberti's architectural studies proceeded
from similar presuppositions and perhaps in contact with each other.
As a papal secretary, Fiocchi, who died in 1452, would have been
known to Alberti.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Alberti himself lamented the prolixity of
contemporary legal codes in contrast to the few but
powerful laws of the early Romans the Twelve Tables.98
His position in the De iure and elsewhere is more
clearly governed by his interest in justice as the humane,
rational, and appropriate exercise of judgment in
relation to human conduct on the basis of fundamental
moral principles. Alberti's architectural theory is caught
in just such an oscillation between historicizing and
abstract conceptions of a field of study involving
legislation in a double sense, both as the recognition of
regularities in natural process and human conduct and,
based on these, as the elaboration of prescriptive
norms.99 Alberti's concern, whether in the sphere of
language or in that of architecture, was never with
inherent principles or-in a narrow sense "laws"
governing usage, but rather with the elaboration of a
flexible, expressive, and "gracious" public style capable
of producing appropriately edifying and conciliatory
effects. This is the gist of an extended passage on
education in the Della Famiglia, in which he stresses his
opposition to durezza, a rigidity of approach, that can
manifest itself in a range of social practices and
communicative forms.100
Whatever Alberti brought to his moral philosophical
and architectural studies from his own legal training,
humanist reconceptualization of the law was beginning
to have an impact on legal education. A powerful echo
of this was heard in Ferrara, where soon after his
accession in 1440, Alberti's friend and patron Leonello
d'Este reformed the university. In particular, he recruited
well-known legists to the faculty but set them alongside
representatives of the new learning, including moral
philosophy, in a constellation of disciplinary fields that
recalls Alberti's intellectual interests in the late 1430s
and early 1440s.101
98. Ibid., p. 92.
99. The only study of Alberti known to me that gives due
emphasis to Alberti's legal background is Muhlmann, ibid.
100. Alberti (see note 19), pp. 26-30. Note especially (p. 27):
"Non siate difficili, non duri, non ostinati, non leggeri ... non vani,
ma facilissimi, trattabili, versatili, e quanto s'appartenga nella eta
pesanti e gravi, e quanto in voi sia cercate con tutti essere gratissimi."
See also, p. 29: "nel vizio ... piu vi surge dolore che piacere....
Nella virtu tutto contra, lieta, graziosa e amena, sempre ti contenta,
mai ti duole."
101. Mancini (see note 8), p. 1 76; F. Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti
(Milan: Electa, 1975), p. 20. Leonello appointed Teodoro Gaza to
teach Greek (Alberti dedicated to Gaza his Latin version of his
E/ementi di pittura; Mancini [see note 8], p. 129), Angelo degli Ubaldi
 56 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998

Leonello's regime, then, though certainly monarchic,Cosimo allegedly turned down as far too grand ("troppo
was marked by the patronage of humanist learning, suntuosa e grande").104
which, not least through its conspicuous inclusion of The story does not appear in Manetti's biography of
legal learning, contributed to the image of Ferrara or Brunelleschi (which is incomplete) or in any other
certainly, at least, the d'Este court-as a place of fifteenth-century source.105 Its earliest appearance is in
ordered and equitable government, especially in Antonio Billi's early-sixteenth-century, widely diffused
contrast to the notorious situation under Leonello's compilation of notes on and references to earlier works
father. Indeed, the succession of regimes in Ferrara of art and artists.106 In view of the date of Billi's book,
appears to have provided a model for Alberti's many scholars have dismissed the story as apocryphal.
distinction in the De re aedificatoria between a city An immediate problem is the apparent inconsistency
ruled by a tyrant and one ruled by a benevolent prince,between Cosimo's rejection of a magnificent scheme
which is closely related to the further distinction and the all too obvious magnificence of the executed
between the residences appropriate to each. Alberti's palace, which in turn has led scholars to see the
conception of the house of a leading citizen in a free construction of the palace as a crucial episode in the
state is articulated at great length in terms that evolution of a new scale of values marked by the
irresistibly recall, as Tonnesmann has recently clarified,triumph of the Aristotelian virtue of magnificence.'107
the Florentine Palazzo Medici.102 Such a shift in patrician aesthetic attitudes and their
ideological resonances, however, seems irreconcilable
with the copiously documented ascetic stance of
IV
Cosimo himself, for which the story of the rejection of
If any secular fifteenth-century Florentine building Brunelleschi's scheme provides only too convenient a
expresses Albertian principles, it is the Palazzo Medici confirmation. This opposition has been reconciled by
the claim for a disjunction between a relatively sober
(fig. 3). The possibility of an Albertian involvement in the
design has already been entertained by Isabel Hyman, exterior and a lavishly magnificent interior, giving
though apparently without effect on more recent striking physical expression to a generational divide
scholarship.103 The orthodox position was that the between Cosimo and his sons, who had a far more
architect Michelozzo elaborated the design for his longrelaxed attitude to the display of wealth, especially in
standing patron Cosimo de' Medici, whose own the form of objects of rare workmanship and high
contribution to the design process is usually assumed to artistic quality.108 But this requires an improbable
have been substantial. This position appeared reading of the story of Cosimo's rebuff to Brunelleschi,
unassailable until Brenda Preyer launched a bravura that is, that abstract issues the morality of
attack on it, restoring to the center of the discussion the
question of a Brunelleschi project for the palace, which
104. B. Preyer, "L'architettura del Palazzo Medici," in ll Palazzo
Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed. G. Cherubini and G. Fanelli (Florence:
Giunti, 1990), pp. 58-75.
105. Hyman (see note 103), p. 105, notes that Manetti does assert
that the signori of Florence and other cities clamored for Brunelleschi
in Civil Law, and Ludoviso Crivelli and Francesco Accolti in Canon to design palaces as his fame spread. It is hard to see what palace
Law. Accolti was evidently a friend of Alberti; in 1442 he contributed builder in Florence would have qualified as a signore before
a poem on envy to the second certame. His official appointment at Brunelleschi's death in 1446, if not Cosimo and Piero de' Medici.
Ferrara was in 1450, but the document refers to many years of 106. P. Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven and
previous service. See Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 1 (Rome: London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 173f., n. 125. Rubin
Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960), pp. 104f. On shifts in legalemphasizes the number of versions in which Billi's notes appeared.
education in general, see Maclean (see note 61), pp. 13-20. This indicates that in Billi's own time, the story about the Brunelleschi
102. Tonnesmann (see note 26), pp. 71-88. project for the palace received wide credence.
103. I. Hyman, Fifteenth-Century Florentine Studies: The Palazzo 107. For a recent summary of the ancient sources and modern
Medici and a Ledger for the Church of San Lorenzo (New York: discussions, see J. Hankins, "Cosimo de' Medici as Patron of
Garland, 1977), p. 1 95. Hyman raises the suggestion somewhat in Literature," in Cosimo 'il Vecchio' de' Medici 1389-1464, ed. F. Ames
passing, referring not to qualities of Alberti's approach to architecturalLewis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 84f.
design, but only to aspects of his conceptualization of palace 108. The main, very influential proponent of this position is
architecture in the De re aedificatoria. Gombrich (see note 31).

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Burroughs: Grammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 57

Figure 3. Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, Palazzo Medici, Florence,

facade. Courtesy of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

magnificence, and so on-were at the center of
deliberations in the early 1440s about the aspect of the
palace. Far more plausible, because anchored in
concrete circumstance, is the interpretation offered by
Wolfger Bulst, who focuses attention on an
inconspicuous little house constructed at about the same
time as the palace on Medici land just to the north of
the palace garden. The erection on this site of a grand
structure would have provided a suitably magnificent
end wall for the garden. Bulst suggests that the Medici
deliberately refrained from this out of sensitivity to the
concerns of neighbors, especially the Neroni family,
whose residence adjoined the Medici land parcel on
Borgo S. Lorenzo (now the Via dei Ginori).109
109. Bulst (see note 24), p. 107.
More generally, indeed, the palace as built shrank
back from the Borgo, the main street of the quarter,
leading out to the Porta San Gallo, as well as from the
recently expanded piazza in front of San Lorenzo itself.
Instead, the decision to front the palace onto the Via
Larga, leading to sites closely associated with the
Medici, revived or rather reinterpreted a medieval
pattern of enclave formation.1 10 This may even have
been a connotation of the marked effect of verticality
and height of the palace in contrast to the major urban
110. R. Goldthwaite, "The Florentine Palace as Domestic
Architecture," American Historical Review 77 (1972):981, notes that in
the Bonsignori plan of 1584, arches are visible over the entrance to
some side streets; he plausibly suggests that these marked family
enclaves. Unlike Venice, none is now extant in Florence.

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 58 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998
palaces of the previous generation and regime, notably
the Palazzo da Uzzano (Capponi).111
If so, we need to review the current standard account
of the palace as embodying a novel fusion of signal
characteristics of public and private palatial architecture.
There is some truth in this, certainly, but it does not take
into account the diversity-emphasized, for example, in
Sinding-Larsen's analysis of rustication types in
residential facades-of vernacular palace building.112
The most striking citation of a public building is that of
the two-part windows with inscribed insignia, clearly
reminiscent of the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria.
In the mid-fifteenth century, however, such windows
occur not only in residential architecture but also in
ecclesiastical architecture, at least outside Florence.1"3
An important correspondence between the Palazzo
Medici and the Palazzo della Signoria was the presence
of a chapel, a standard element of a public hall or
palace of justice, but unprecedented in the residential
architecture of Florence.114 The lavish decoration of the
chapel in the Medici palace is well known, but this
perhaps impressed pious contemporaries less than the
powerful charisma and sanctity conferred by the relics
of Christ's Passion preserved in the chapel.115 The
chapels of both buildings, moreover, shared a cult not
only of the Virgin but also of St. Bernard of Clairvaux.116
A further possible echo of the Palazzo della Signoria
in the palace is the cortile (fig. 4), though more overt
spatial and formal correspondences connect the
architecture and underlying geometry of the palace
courtyard with a major religious building, San
I 1 1. Preyer (see note 104), p. 61.
1 12. S. Sinding-Larsen, "A Tale of Two Cities: Florentine and
Roman Visual Context for Fifteenth-Century Palaces," Acta ad
Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 6 (1975):163-193.
l 13. On the Roman Palazzo Capranica, for example, see P. Tomei,
L'architettura a Roma nel quattrocento (Rome: Multigrafica, 1977
[1942]), pp. 60ff.; T. Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento
Architecture (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1958), pp. 227ff.
114. C. Acidini Luchinat, "La cappella medicea attraverso cinque
secoli," in 1I Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed. G. Cherubini and
G. Fanelli (Florence: Giunti, 1990), p. 82. On the Cappella
dell'Udienza in the Palazzo della Signoria, see Rubinstein (see note
25), pp. 104f.
115. Acidini Luchinat (see note 114), p. 82. On the Cappella
dell'Udienza in the Palazzo della Signoria, see Rubinstein (see note
25), pp. 104f.
116. Acidini Luchinat (see note 114), pp. 82f., notes the presence
on the altar of a reliquary (the "Reliquario del Libretto," now in the
Opera del Duomo) containing relics of Christ's Passion.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lorenzo.'17 Indeed, the close resemblance between the
palace courtyard and the interior of San Lorenzo not
only suggests a common origin in a Brunelleschian
scheme encompassing both buildings, but also
establishes a visual sign of the sacrality inherent in the
palace, which was soon echoed throughout the
reception areas of the house, not least the courtyard and
garden, in classicizing imagery that used ancient myth
in a syncretic way to express moral and patriotic
values.118 San Lorenzo was rebuilt, moreover, in a
markedly neo-early Christian format allusive to the
Constantinian basilica of St. Peter's, with which it shares
the orientation of the facade to the east. The all'antica
features of the palace have often been stressed, but both
palace and church carried clear references to Rome,
however subtly combined with local references.1 19
For all the correspondences of the church and the
palace, the architecture of the latter-especially its
facade-exhibits an interweaving of diverse stylistic and
allusive registers into a highly unified architectural
composition that goes far beyond the austerity of San
Lorenzo. In its linguistic complexity and sophistication
this is prima facie an Albertian (as well as Medicean)
design solution that draws on but does not instantiate
Brunelleschi's signature rigor and rationalism. In other
words, the Palazzo Medici wraps an Albertian facade
around a Brunelleschian core. More generally, however,
as Tonnesmann has stressed, the palace corresponds
typologically to conceptualizations, however concise, of
11 7. Ibid., p. 84; R. Hatfield, "Cosimo de' Medici and His
Chapel," in Cosimo 'il Vecchio' de' Medici 1389-1464, ed. F. Ames
Lewis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 241 f.
Hatfield notes the presence of St. Bernard in the chapel's altarpiece
and speculates that Cosimo, not Piero, would have commissioned a
painting with such express references to the virtue of humility. It is
interesting that Hatfield's thesis opposes the Gombrichian notion of
distinct spheres of interest on the part of father and son in the
construction and decoration of the palace. I am speculating that there
was a cult, as such, of St. Bernard in the Medici chapel; the main
dedication was to the Trinity.
118. The evidence is assembled by Hyman (see note 103), pp.
122-127. M. T. Bartoli, "Le caratteristiche geometriche e numeriche di
Palazzo Medici," in 11 Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed. G.
Cherubini and G. Fanelli (Florence: Giunti, 1990), p. 77, finds a close
relationship between the geometrical ordering of the Medici courtyard
and that of the Palazzo Busini of about two decades earlier, which she
unhesitatingly attributes to Brunelleschi. She does not doubt the
attribution of the Medici palace to Michelozzo. In contrast, Preyer (see
note 104) argues that Brunelleschi was responsible for the design not
only of the courtyard, but even of the Medici palace as a whole. For
her analysis of the courtyard, see p. 64.
119. Hyman (see note 118), pp. 122f.
 Burroughs: Grammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 59

Figure 4. Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, Palazzo Medici, Florence, courtyard. Courtesy of Scala/Art Resource,
New York.

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
60 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998
the residential architecture appropriate to a leading
citizen in the De re aedifcatoria.120 But the hypothesis of
an Albertian intervention must confront questions of the
date and occasion of such an intervention and of its
implications for an adequate account of the mechanics
of patronage.
Alberti is always assumed to have left Florence with
the rest of the papal court in late 1443. The work on the
palace began in earnest in 1444, though the work on
San Lorenzo, which Hyman has shown was closely
associated with the palace project, had been under way
since 1441. If in fact Alberti returned to Rome in 1443,
he was in Florence during the crucial period of
discussions about the form and even site of the palace
that Cosimo and his sons intended to build on the Via
Larga. At that time, his chief interlocutor can only have
been Piero de' Medici, with whom his relationship was
by then long-standing, as Gunter Schweikhart
demonstrates in a discussion of this specific topic.121 The
crucial piece of evidence is Alberti's preface to an Italian
version of the De re uxoria, addressed to Piero, in which
he not only claims but also substantiates a close
friendship between them. In particular, Alberti mentions
Piero's close reading of his works, an obvious reference
especially, as Schweikhart argues, to the De Pictura,
which the art lover and bibliophile Piero assuredly had
in his library.122 The association of the two men in the
certame, then, was a natural expression of Piero's
respect and support for Alberti's intellectual and critical
acumen. Schweikhart assumes that Piero, who owned a
Vitruvius manuscript, would have been privy to Alberti's
developing meditations on architecture.' 23
The pressing question is whether Alberti would
already have been in a position to offer compelling
advice on the subject of architecture. In his review of
the evidence for Alberti's early architectural knowledge,
120. Tonnesmann (see note 26), pp. 74f., refers specifically to
De re aedificatoria V.6, Orlandi and Portoghesi (see note 2), vol. 1,
p. 359. This passage belongs then to the part of the treatise (books
one-five) written before the reconceptualization of the whole
enterprise indicated at the beginning of book six. W. Bulst, "Die sala
grande des Palazzo Medici in Florenz: Rekonstruktion und Bedeutung,"
in Piero de' Medici "il gottoso" (1416-1469): Kunst im Dienste der
Mediceer, ed. U. Beyer and B. Boucher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993),
pp. 108, 112, points out correspondences between interior spaces and
their arrangement and prescriptions in the De re aedificatoria.
121. Schweikhart (see note 1), pp. 369-372.
122. Ibid., p. 371.
123. "Die Kenntnis von den entstehenden Traktaten Albertis [the
De re aedificatoria and De statua] kann bei Piero vorausgesetzt
werden"; see ibid., p. 371.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Bruschi collects the many references or allusions in the
De Pictura to Vitruvius, though he stresses that these
betray an interest primarily in ornament (significantly
Bruschi opposes this to "the architectural grammar of
antiquity," not yet absorbed by Alberti) and a conception
of painting as the primary and dominant visual art.124
Nevertheless, there is considerable, though not
unambiguous, evidence that by the early 1 450s Alberti
had acquired a considerable reputation as an
architectural expert. In the De re aedificatoria, Alberti
claims to have acted as a technical consultant on the
decayed Constantinian basilica of St. Peter's, which was
consolidated and restored under Nicholas V.125 A
Florentine chronicle represents Alberti as equipped with
the authority to intervene and stop work on Pope
Nicholas's project to rebuild at least the choir and
crossing of St. Peter's.126 Whatever the truth of this
account, it was certainly entirely credible at the time.
This was not the first time Alberti had appeared as an
arbiter in deliberations on a complex and highly visible
artistic project. In 1441 in Ferrara, Alberti's friend
Leonello d'Este relied on Alberti to review submissions
for an equestrian monument to his father and
predecessor as duke. Soon, of course, Alberti himself
was almost certainly involved in the formulation of the
design for the classicizing architectural base of the
statue.127 Such a step from the assessment of others'
work to direct involvement in design seems also to have
occurred in Rome, though the evidence is far from
conclusive. Alberti's involvement in the Ferrarese
competition roughly coincided, of course, with the
Florentine literary certame, in which, again, Alberti
played two roles, as both author and organizer,
significantly modeling his certame, in all probability, on
a passage in Vitruvius's treatise.128 In Mantua, finally, at
124. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, X.1 7 (Orlandi and Portoghesi [see
note 2], 2:998/999; Rykwert, Tavernor, and Leach [see note 2], p. 362).
Alberti may have been involved also with the restoration of the Ponte
S. Angelo, described in its ideal original state in Orlandi and
Portoghesi (see note 2), 2:71 0/71 1; Rykwert, Tavernor, and Leach [see
note 2], p. 262.
125. For a discussion of the relevant sources, usually cited as if
unproblematic, see C. Burroughs, From Signs to Design: Environmental
Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome (Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 251 f.
126. Mancini (see note 8), pp. 1 78-1 80.
127. Rosenberg (see note 6), pp. 57-61; Mancini (see note 8), pp.
1 78-1 80.
128. C. Pollio Vitruvius, De architectura VII, preface 4-7 (cf. C.
Fensterbusch, ed., Vitruv, Zehn Buicher uiber Architektur [Darmstadt:
 Burroughs: (rammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 61
the very end of his life, Alberti again proceeded from the
critical review of existing architectural projects to
proposing, with triumphant success, his own solution to
the requirements he had outlined for the pilgrimage
basilica of S. Andrea.129
Antonio Billi's report of a Brunelleschian model for
the Palazzo Medici provides a further case of the critical
review of a project followed by an alternative design
incorporating, as we saw, significant features of its
predecessor. The structural correspondence between this
case and others in which Alberti's intervention is
documented is certainly not enough for proof of his
active involvement here. If we accept Billi's account, we
can surely assume that Alberti indeed played some role
in deliberations about the palace, as long as we accept
the further proposition that Piero was substantially
involved in these, even though he was only 25 in 1441
and his documented involvement in architectural
patronage started in 1445.
Various evidence suggests that the hypothesis of an
absolute division of labor between Cosimo and Piero in
matters of patronage is not sustainable. Piero occupied
and fitted out the main apartment of the new palace,
directly behind the main facade; Cosimo didn't move
out of the old Medici complex until 1456, and then he
took the rear apartment overlooking the garden and the
church square.130 With the death of Cosimo's younger
brother in 1440, Cosimo became head of Lorenzo's
immediate family, younger than his own. This may have
been a factor in his tardy transfer into the new house.
Piero, meanwhile, probably inherited some of Lorenzo's
activities; in this context, Vasari's unfortunately
unconfirmed account of Lorenzo's role as collector,
especially of objets de luxe of markedly courtly flavor, is
particularly suggestive.131
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964], pp. 304f.). The passage is
signaled by Gorni, "Certame Coronario" (see note 8), p. 13, who notes
Vitruvius's explicit mention of iudices litterati and an audience
comprising populus cunctus. Gorni also points out that the rare term
coronarius occurs in Vitruvius (p. 1 4).
129. P. Carpeggiani, "'Renovatio urbis': strategie urbane a
Mantova nell'eta di Ludovico Gonzaga (1444-1478)," in Leon Battista
Alberti, ed. J. Rykwert and A. Engel (Milan: Electa, 1994), pp. 1 79f.,
with bibliography.
130. H. Saalman and P. Mattox, "The First Medici Palace," Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians 44 (1985):329 n. 4.
1 31. On Lorenzo, see J. Paoletti, "Fraternal Piety and Fraternal
Power: The Artistic Patronage of Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici," in
Cosimo 'il Vecchio' de' Medici 1389-1464, ed. F. Ames-Lewis (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 197f. Paoletti notes
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Finally, there is good evidence of Piero's early role as
patron and connoisseur of paintings. In particular, he
commissioned from Filippo Lippi works of particular
importance in the earliest decoration of the palace.132
Around 1440, Lippi was developing an increasing
interest in elaborate architectural backgrounds,
emphasizing the effect of perspectival recession into
virtual space, but also-at least in some cases
suggesting a formal correspondence between fictive
architecture represented in a painted scene and the
architectural framing of the physical space in front of the
painting. What was at stake, then, when in 1439-as a
famous letter from the artist to Piero seems to indicate
Piero rejected a painted altarpiece by Filippo Lippi? Did
Piero want a more emphatic architectural background or
even one that showed a greater grasp of architectural
rationality-in figures as well as buildings-than Lippi
had tended to display, but which he was certainly
developing by the early 1440s? If so, did Piero turn to
his learned friend Alberti for expert guidance in the
judgment both of a painting and-in this case-of fictive
architecture? The case of Lippi indicates that the
judgment of paintings was also becoming the judgment
of architecture, though not necessarily from a
Brunelleschian perspective. Bruschi has emphasized the
emergence of a rich and ornamented "sculptor's
architecture," which he associates with Donatello,
Ghiberti, and Michelozzo, but also with Alberti.133 It is
an architecture capable not only of accommodating
distinct types of heraldic and emblematic imagery but of
itself becoming an "Impresendekor," a formally varied
and semiotically dense but, of course, far from univocal
emblematic composition, which seems connected
specifically with Piero's taste. 134
that there is no confirmation in the 141 7-141 8 inventory of the claims
of Vasari that Lorenzo possessed images of "giostre, tornamenti, cacce,
feste ed altri spettacoli fatti ne' tempi suoi." Of course, Lorenzo may
have collected such objects only later than 141 7, perhaps especially in
the years following his brother's rise to power.
132. For what follows, see J. Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and
Work (London and New York: Abrams, 1993), pp. 2 7-33, 399-400;
Ames-Lewis (see note 24).
1 33. Bruschi (see note 5), pp. 1 9f.
134. As noted by Tonnesmann (see note 26), p. 71. But since
"Piero's political position is identical to Cosimo's," Tonnesmann sees
no reason to inquire about the specific patronage of one or the other,
at least with regard to the design of the palace. For the term
"Impresendekor," see Bulst (see note 120), p. 92. Bulst uses the term
only of the interior of the palace, in which he thinks Piero's courtly
taste was allowed free rein, even during Cosimo's lifetime. It seems to
me no less appropriately applied to the exterior.
62 RES 34 AUTUMN 1998

Such a characterization fits the facade designs both of emphasis by the loggia and coat of arms, as well as by
the Palazzo Medici and the Palazzo Rucellai (fig. 2), the convergence of two matching, monumental facades.
whatever the obvious contrasts between them. In both As Elam notes, a canto was far removed from
we admire the way certain elements are made to carryprevailing conceptions of the expansive and regular
both ancient Roman and traditional Florentine princely piazzas of the Renaissance; it was nothing more than a
and civic connotations. In both cases, also, the facade is meeting of streets at a prominent corner, such as
frankly treated as surface-that is, as a semiotic entityoccurred rather frequently in Florence. In the De re
rather than as the "natural" index of interior spatial aedificatoria, Alberti would soon situate what he calls
relations.'35 Such an approach betrays a thoroughly the trivium, formed by the meeting of streets, on a
Albertian cunning, even if it took the practicality of a hierarchy of public spaces, from the street to the
Michelozzo or Rossellino to bring it to fulfillment. The piazza'39 It is a description that applies very well to the
complex referentiality across space and time of the new Canto de' Medici, but of course also to the Canto
palace facade may well also resonate with the particular degli Alberti, with its medieval tower and archaic loggia
interest of Piero de' Medici in historical writing. 136 dominating the southern stretch of the Via de' Benci, a
Brunelleschi, as Hyman argues, envisaged a building street that marked, as did the Via de' Gori, the path of
oriented in directional or topographical and abstract or the early-twelfth-century wall system.
geometrical terms toward San Lorenzo. In spite of the These correspondences between the Alberti and
Libro di Antonio Billi-or at least one version of it Medici complexes, the dominant patrician complexes in
there now seems no question that a site other than the their respective gonfaloni (urban districts), can hardly be
present one was seriously considered. However, an early coincidental. Both buildings, for all their formal
project for the palace may have placed the main differences, can be understood as addressing the city
entrance on the Via de' Gori, rather than on the Via through an anthropomorphism ascribed to the urban
Larga; the southern frontage of the palace, facing the environment by Dante, who figured the towers of
heart of the city, on the Via de' Gori remained the Florence these probably already included the Alberti
longest of the original building.'37 Caroline Elam has tower-as giants.140 Through novel architectural means
stressed the importance of the corner view in and the institution of a novel visual rhetoric, the Medici
contemporary Florence (though hardly, it seems, in Palace raises to a new level the idea of the building as a
Brunelleschi's work!) and of the specific visual effect ofsite and even subject of enunciation, though the
the palace's architecturally enhanced "Corner of the presence of a traditional type of space-the loggia
Medici" (Canto de' Medici) on anyone proceeding north accommodating interaction is surely also significant.141
from the Baptistry into what had by now become an Dominating the field of attention established by the
extended Medici enclave.'38 The corner was given canto, the palace not only expresses certain familial and
civic values and qualities, but it also presents an
135. The "facadism" of the Palazzo Rucellai is obvious; for that ofemblematic portrait of the Medici family at a time, as
the Palazzo Medici, see Preyer (see note 1 04), p. 64: "la facciata si we saw, of particular concern with the portrayal of
mostra quindi come un semplice rivestimento applicato all'edificio, a family members.
differenza di quasi tutti i palazzi piu antichi in cui la muratura
This emblematic quality of the palace is cumulatively
prosegue oltre tutti gli spigoli." It is indeed curious that Preyer, the first
to give due emphasis to this aspect of the facade, should want to
evoked, needless to say, on different levels of specificity,
attribute its design to Brunelleschi! as occurs more distinctly in the Rucellai facade that
136. Ames-Lewis (see note 24), p. 70. Alberti would shortly design, evidently in part to
137. The main facade is 40.80 m (10 modules), and that on the
Via de' Gori 38.30 m (9 modules), excluding the garden wall; see
Bartoli (see note 118), p. 76. 139. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, Vl11.6, calling a trivium a kind of
138. C. Elam, "II palazzo nel contesto della citta: strategie forum (Orlandi and Portoghesi [see note 2], 2:713/714f.; Rykwert,
urbanistiche dei Medici nel Gonfalone del Leon d'Oro, 141 5-1430,"Tavernor, and Leach [see note 2], p. 263, where trivium is translated
in 11 Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed. G. Cherubini and G. as "crossroads").
Fanelli (Florence: Giunti, 1990), pp. 44, 47. She notes that the Via 140. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 31, 27-33.
Larga did not reach much farther north than the rear of the church of 141. Preyer (see note 104), p. 61, notes that the type of the Medici
S. Marco; in other words, the street gave access to, but not through, aloggia was quite unusual but likens it to a loggia that existed in the
quite circumscribed area. present Palazzo Horne, the former Palagetto Alberti(!).

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Burroughs: (rammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture 63

celebrate a rapprochement of the Rucellai and Medici a transition between or rather an epoch-making
families.142 The Medici heraldic insignia, the famous convergence of the developing architectural expertise
palle, appear as a discrete coat of arms, conspicuously of Alberti and his long-standing interest in emblematic
mounted on the corner of the palace but also along representations and allusions. If in his architectural
with other family devices-integrated into window treatise, no doubt for strategic reasons, Alberti focuses
surrounds, on the model of the Palazzo della Signoria, on the former to the exclusion of the latter, the
and into the decoration of the cortile.143 The emphatic convergence nevertheless occurs again, to remarkable
replication even of heraldic elements like the palle effect, in the actual buildings that he would design over
enforces their redundancy in terms of heraldic coding the rest of his life.
but associates them with wider, indeed more emblem
like, allusiveness and with the cultural sophistication
required in the response to this.144 Moreover, the Florence in the chapel, not only in the architectural decoration but
prevalence and architectural integration of such also, by contrast, in emblematic forms, for example, in the frieze of
lilies crowning the aedicula, though in style the latter suggests
decorative details invites the observer to understand
northern or "oriental" ornamental fashion.
crucial elements of the architectural composition as
emblematic in character. This is surely the case of the
rustication, whose multiple connotations and
sophisticated facture have been extensively discussed by
modern commentators.
Even the organizing grid of the building itself belongs
in this context. Accordingly, the Brunelleschian
courtyard-a model of rigorous and transcendentally
grounded architectural grammar becomes an
emblematic construct, as evocative and expressive as
any of the imagery and statuary set within it.145 It marks

142. Burroughs (see note 125), p. 41.

143. On the "ausufernde heraldische Reprasentation" of the
palace and its adaptation of the decorative system of the Palazzo della
Signoria, see Tonnesmann (see note 26), pp. 82f.; cf. Preyer (see note
104), p. 63. On the family's use of devices in general, see F. Ames
Lewis, "Early Medicean Devices," Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979):122-143. On devices and the
emblematic treatment of heraldry as associated specifically with Piero,
see pp. 127-130, 140f.; on the links with d'Este Ferrara and courtly
milieus in general, see p. 141.
144. Tonnesmann (see note 26), p. 84, draws attention to the
repetition of heraldic material but draws different conclusions from
mine.
145. A compelling parallel is Alberti's design for the Cappella
Rucellai in San Pancrazio. Nowhere did he depart farther from
Brunelleschian models than in the strangely exotic miniature
simulacrum of the Holy Sepulcher, with its sophisticated fusion of
courtly Gothic, Roman and Tuscan all'antica, and even Arab elements.
But Alberti set these as if by willful contrast within a markedly
Brunelleschian barrel-vaulted chapel of gray pietra serena membering
against white walls, perhaps to emphasize the specific, local site of
this architectural evocation of the great mystery of Christianity. Far
from mirroring reality, here Brunelleschi's architectural system appears
as just another "style," as a quotation with specific and limited cultural
connotations. Borsi (see note 1 01), pp. 1 1 1 f., notes the contrast
between the two elements and emphasizes the various evocations of

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:34:05 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms