While the chapel of Saint Sigismund was under construction, other chapels were also being built under the direction of Matteo de’ Pasti and the sculptor Agostino di Duccio. On the face of it, these chapels, with their pointed arches and narrow lancet windows, simply extended the architecture of the original church. In detail, however, they were as unlike the angelic confections of a Gothic chantry as could be imagined, for in them Piero’s painted classical architecture was applied in marble to the structure of the building. Each of the arches was supported on a pair of Corinthian pilasters and was outlined by a molding carved in the manner of a Roman triumphal arch, inscribed in tall Roman capitals with epigraphs glorifying Sigismondo Malatesta.
These new chapels were nominally dedicated to the saints, but the message of the decorations that covered them was anything but Christian. Rather, the ornament formed an encyclopedia of pagan wisdom. The sacristy—the very place where the ritual objects of the Mass were stored—was dominated by Piero’s subversive fresco of the two Sigismunds. The chapel closest to the altar was dedicated to the muses, their hair flowing, their robes diaphanous, their bodies scandalously revealed. On the other side of the altar was a shrine to the planets, named for the gods of antiquity: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jove, and Saturn, which represented stages in the journey of mortals to Platonic Wisdom. The bones of Malatesta’s forebears were all piled up in an “Ark of the Ancestors”; their chapel was watched over by the prophets and sibyls of ancient times, who had foretold the coming of Christ just as surely as Malatesta’s ancestors prefigured his own rule. The altarpiece image of Verruchio, the founder of the dynasty, was hacked away from the feet of Christ at which he knelt, lest his fame obscure that of his descendant.
Yet another chapel was dominated by the sepulcher of Isotta. Malatesta had de’ Pasti and di Duccio design for her a tomb even grander than the one he built for himself. It was placed high on the wall, supported by elephants and set against the embroidered cloak of a knight surmounted by a helmet. The tomb itself is emblazoned with the arms of the Malatesta, and two putti hold aloft a sheet of bronze inscribed with the name of the condottiere’s mistress. The chapel (and indeed the whole church) is littered with the monogram of an S intertwined with an I—celebrating, some say, the scandalous love of the tyrant, while his legitimate wife lies elsewhere in the church, entombed in obscurity.
As the work progressed, the interior of the Gothic church was clothed in classical ornament. Corinthian columns, rich cornices, and balustrades covered the architecture with fragments of antiquity. The acanthus and the laurel spread their foliage over the plain walls, and the old chapels and shrines of the saints were given over to exotic elephants, putti riding dolphins, and venerated courtesans.
Sigismondo’s own tomb capped the whole overblown, egotistic, pagan affair. It was piled high with armor and hung with banners that displayed his bawdy motto: “I bear the horn that all may see, so big you cannot believe.” (It is said that when his body was exhumed in the eighteenth century, Malatesta’s skull was indeed disfigured by a devilish horn.) To complete the blasphemy, Malatesta placed an inscription above the door to his temple, as grandiose as if he were some deified Roman emperor.
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the son of Pandolfo—having survived many grievous adventures in the Italic War—a bringer of victory—in thanksgiving for the deeds he performed with valour and fortitude, to God the everlasting and to the city has dedicated this temple—having in his magnanimity built it at his own expense—leaving a noble, holy monument.
IT IS NOT recorded whether he was present at the trial of the soul of Sigismondo Malatesta, but if he was, one of the secretaries to the papal Curia must have been squirming. Like Sigismondo Malatesta, Leone Battista Alberti was a bastard, born into a bastard family. He was the illegitimate son of a house that had been banished from Florence and had a price on their heads. His father died when he was young, his family did not honor his inheritance, and he was forced to go out into the world to make a living. Alberti chose the life of a scholar: he studied canon law in Bologna and took Holy Orders in 1428. He distinguished himself in all manner of things. According to his autobiographical Vita Anonyma, he was so strong that he could throw a coin up into the air and bounce it off the high cathedral vault above him, and he could jump over a man’s head with his feet together.
Alberti read and wrote in the manner of the humanists, studying the literature of the ancients so that he might better understand them and create works in their manner. In 1424, he composed Philodoxeus, an allegorical love story, in a Latin so perfect that a decade later he had to add a commentary explaining that the play had not been produced in antiquity. He codified a grammar of the Tuscan language and composed treatises on the family, meditations on De Commodia et Incommodes Litterarum, and invectives against the priesthood, all in the crisp Latin of Cicero or Caesar. He also confected Intercoenales, Theogenius, and Momus, dark fables in the more fantastic manner of Lucian.
It was through such fables that Alberti liked to explain, if that is the word, the purpose of his studies. He told one such story in Intercoenales. He had dreamed a dream, he said. He had found himself standing on a mountain whose base was girded about with the River of Life. The river was full of people: some holding on to the inflated bladders of animals to stay afloat, others crowded together in sinking ships, and still others attempting to brave the waters unaided and alone. Most clung to rafts made of wooden boards, some rafts drifting by themselves, others crudely lashed together.
Alberti saw a host of beings flitting through the air above the waters and the people, and he wondered who they were. A shade appeared by his side and said:
Offer supreme honour to those you see here set apart from the multitude . . . Justly . . . are they considered divine, not only because of their divine endowments, but also because they were the first to construct the boards that you see floating in the river. Those boards, upon which they carved the name of the each of the Liberal Arts, are a great help to those that are swimming.
And then the shade pointed out another group of beings, below the gods but above the desperate castaways in the water.
Those others are also similar to the gods, but they do not entirely emerge from the waters because their winged sandals are imperfect: these are demigods, and they are most deserving of honour and veneration . . . It is their merit to have enlarged the boards by adding pieces of flotsam to them. Further, they engage in the admirable enterprise of collecting the boards from the reefs and the beaches, in order to construct new ones and to proffer these works to those who still swim in the midstream.
Render, O Mortal, honour to these. Render them the thanks that they are due for having offered excellent help with these boards to those negotiating the toilsome river of life.
“This is what I saw and heard in my sleep,” Alberti recorded, “and I seemed in a marvellous way to have somehow managed to be numbered among the winged gods.” In his dream he was one of the divine: not a rearranger, but an inventor of the boards that assisted those who swam through the River of Life. Such, at any rate, were his aspirations.
Alberti joined the papal Curia in 1432 as an abbreviator: his Latinity was useful in drafting the endless pronouncements, minuting the endless meetings, and writing the endless letters that issued forth from the papal court. It was in the train of the papal court that Alberti first returned to Florence, the city from which his family had been exiled; and it was in Florence that he first encountered the Renaissance not only of letters but of things. Inside the cathedral, Alberti would have had time to admire the vast dome of Filippo Brunelleschi, whose completion he was there to celebrate. So enormous was this dome that it could contain the very Pantheon of Rome. Indeed, Brunelleschi had spent time in the Eternal City contemplating, measuring, and dissecting the ruins of Roman buildings in order to understand the manner of their construction and to plan the construction of his masterpiece. Most people assumed that the Roman ruins had been built by giants, or devi
ls, or miracles; but Brunelleschi scoffed at such old wives’ tales and set to measuring the buildings themselves. When he returned to Florence he used what he had learned in order to surpass the buildings from which he had learned it.
So amazed was Alberti by the innovations of Filippo Brunelleschi and the other artificers of Florence that he wrote Latin treatises in their honor. De Pictura and De Statua gave literary expression to the crafts of painting and sculpture and elevated them into the realm of intellectual speculation. In the 1440s, Alberti began the long process of doing the same thing for architecture, modeling his De Re Aedificatoria on the only architectural treatise that had survived from antiquity: Vitruvius’s De Architectura. Like Vitruvius’s work, De Re Aedificatoria is divided into ten books, which deal with public and private buildings, engineering, and the classical orders, liberally sprinkled with the writings of other authorities. But Alberti found Vitruvius himself a dubious source.
What he handed down was in any case not refined; and his speech such that the Latins might think that he wanted to appear a Greek, while the Greeks might think that he gabbled Latin. However, his very text is evidence that he wrote neither Greek nor Latin, so that as far as we are concerned he might never have written at all, rather than write something that we cannot understand.
Alberti strove to restate what Vitruvius had written in a pure Latin, uncorrupted by Greek. His very title De Re Aedificatoria is a Latinization of De Architectura, which is, at its root, a Greek word. “What we have written is (unless I am mistaken) in proper Latin, and in comprehensible form,” he noted. But it was not only a corrupted text with which Alberti had to deal, but also a corrupted architecture. He continued:
Examples of ancient temples and theatres have survived that may teach us as much as any professor, but I see—not without sorrow—these very buildings being despoiled more each day. And anyone who happens to build nowadays draws his inspiration from inept modern nonsense rather than proven and much commended methods. Nobody would deny that as a result of all of this a whole section of our life and learning could disappear altogether.
Alberti’s task was clear, and urgent: “I felt it the duty of any gentleman or any person of learning to save from total extinction a discipline that our prudent ancestors had valued so highly.”
De Re Aedificatoria was an attempt to revive and preserve the architectural wisdom of the ancients, and the architectural world that Alberti described in the text was one from which “inept modern nonsense”—meaning not only the work of his contemporaries but indeed the entire architectural legacy of the Middle Ages—had been carefully excised. Alberti described cities filled with magnificent fora and porticoes and theaters—buildings that, in his time, were the moldering haunts of thieves if they stood at all. He described churches as temples, the habitation of many gods rather than the one God of the Christians; and he wrote of the wisdom of Pliny or Herodotus as if they were speaking in his own time, and not from some remote and ruined past.
De Re Aedificatoria was the work of a theorist, rather than a practitioner; but as the composition of the book was drawing to a close, Alberti was given the opportunity to put his words into action. It is not recorded exactly how and where the humanist scholar met Sigismondo Malatesta, the tyrant of Rimini, but one of the first fruits of their meeting was a medal made by Matteo de’ Pasti. It bears the date 1450, by which time the Saint Sigismund chapel was already under construction. The face of the medal shows, as ever, the profile of Sigismondo Malatesta, but the obverse depicts a building identified as “the Famous Temple of Rimini.” The medal is small, but it is possible to distinguish the features of this Famous Temple enough to observe that it was not one of the remains of antiquity that dotted the town but a new building, dominated by a huge dome.
The Famous Temple of Rimini was, of course, none other than the church of Saint Francis, whose interior was already in the process of being embellished by the medalist and his assistants. But while Matteo de’ Pasti’s interior was a crude exercise in classical collage, as corrupted as a medieval scribe’s copy of Vitruvius, Alberti’s design for the exterior of the church was as pure a statement of classical wisdom as the author of De Re Aedificatoria could make it. Alberti’s facade wrapped the old brick church in a shroud of white Istrian stone. The original arched door was still there, but the scholar’s design translated it into a triumphal arch dedicated to Sigismondo Malatesta. Alberti knew all about the ancient connection of arches to military glory.
The greatest ornament to the forum or crossroad would be to have an arch at the mouth of each road. For the arch is a gate which is continually open . . . Spoils and victory standards captured from the enemy would be deposited by the gates, standing as they did in a busy place. Hence the practice developed of decorating the arches with inscriptions, statues and histories.
The triumphal arch that Alberti designed for Malatesta was framed by a pair of columns, which, in size and in most details, were copied directly from the ruined city gate built by the emperor Augustus over the entrance to the ancient Via Flaminia connecting Rimini to Rome. To either side of the arch there were niches in which, some say, Alberti intended to place the sarcophagi of Malatesta and Isotta. Above these, the clerestory window of the old building was framed by more pilasters and crowned with the sort of canopy that is held over the sacred relics of those who have been deified.
The sides of the church were similarly translated from a naive provincial Gothic into facades of the strictest classical probity. Each side was given seven rounded arches, each destined to contain the remains of one of the humanists of the court of Sigismondo Malatesta. For the east end of the church Alberti designed a great dome, not pointed in the manner of Brunelleschi’s cupola at Florence, but rounded in the manner of the Pantheon in Rome; and the whole building was raised on a high plinth, like a Roman temple lifted up above the Forum.
Alberti’s Famous Temple of Rimini was classical in its components, but it was also, unlike the interior, classical in its totality. Each and every part was carefully proportioned to each and every other part, so that they all sang in harmony, in accordance with the mathematical laws laid down by the Greeks. Alberti wrote: “I affirm again with Pythagoras: it is absolutely certain that nature is wholly consistent. That is how things stand. The very same numbers that cause sounds to have that concinnitas [harmony], pleasing to the ear, can also fill the eyes with wonder and delight.”
Because each and every part of the Famous Temple of Rimini corresponded with each and every other part, it was beautiful; and because it was beautiful, it was perfect. “Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body,” Alberti proclaimed, “so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.” And if the Famous Temple of Rimini was perfect, was not also its creator divine, and numbered among the winged gods?
While Alberti was making his design in Rimini, Matteo de’ Pasti made another medal, just for him. The face of this medal shows the proud profile of the humanist scholar, and the obverse depicts a typically gnomic emblem: the eye of knowledge, flashing with creative lightning and borne aloft by divine wings. It was surmounted by the inscription “Quid tum?”—which might be translated as, “What next?”
ALBERTI WAS STILL secretary to the papal court. He was called back to Rome after a large wooden model of his design was completed, and the construction of the exterior of the Famous Temple of Rimini was entrusted to Matteo de’ Pasti. A series of letters exchanged between the two men at the end of 1454 illustrates only too well what happens when theory is translated into practice. It is clear that de’ Pasti and his provincial workmen did not understand the classical language of Alberti’s design and had rashly challenged his Pythagorean systems of proportion. Alberti brushed them aside.
Greetings. Your letters were most welcome in many ways, and welcome in that my Lord has done what I wanted, that he has taken the best advice from everyone. But when you tell me that Manetto asserts that the dome should be two diamet
ers high, then I prefer to believe those who built the Baths and the Pantheon and all those other great things rather than him; and reason more than any person. And if he relies on opinion, I will not be surprised if he is often in the wrong.
But besides the aesthetic problems there were practical ones, physical obstacles placed in the way of the realization of his perfect design. Difficulties arose because Alberti was not building a new building but altering an old one, a building that, in his opinion, was clearly an example of “inept modern nonsense.” Alberti wrote to de’ Pasti:
As for the business of the pier in my model, remember what I said to you: that the facade should be an independent structure because I find the widths and heights of those chapels [of the existing building] disturbing . . . If you alter them [the new piers in Alberti’s design], you will make a discord in all that music. And let us consider how to cover the church with something light. Do not trust the piers to carry any weight. And that is why it seemed to us that a wooden barrel vault would be more useful.
Alberti had decided to make his new facade entirely independent from the old building for two reasons. First, he considered the old building so inelegant that he did not want his new one even to touch it. Second, he believed that the enlargement of the church—the new chapels of the muses and the planets, of Saint Sigismund and Isotta—had seriously weakened its structure, which was why he proposed that the ceiling of the nave should be made of timber rather than masonry. As a result, Alberti’s new facade bears little relationship to the Gothic church behind it. Brick walls, medieval buttresses, and lancet windows appear in his new arches pell-mell, the old and the new marking out their own separate rhythms.
The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories Page 16