Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice (review)

This large and learned book offers a study of two Latin texts by Giannozzo Manetti, together with an edition and annotated translation of them. The texts are his tract De secularibus et pontificalibus pompis, which describes the reconsecration of the Florence Cathedral in 1436, and selections from De gestis Nicolai Quinti Summi Pontificis, a biography of the humanist Pope Nicholas V (1447–55). In an appendix, the editors also print and translate Nicholas V's testament as recorded in Manetti's biography. Both texts are linked by their concern with sacred buildings and their meaning in fifteenth-century Italy, and the complementary disciplines of the two authors —Smith is an art historian, and O'Connor a classicist —guarantee an exhaustive treatment of their topic.

The broader context of Manetti's writings is analyzed in an introduction, nine chapters, and a conclusion, in which the authors explore various ways to read his comments on architecture. For centuries, the building and destruction of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem offered biblical exegetes ample material (sit venia verbo) for commentary on the physical reality and symbolic implications of ecclesiastical structures, and the authors draw upon a rich tradition as background to Manetti's thought. Prominent in the discussion are Augustine and the canonist William Durandus (d. 1296), author of the Rationale divinorum officiorum, a lengthy treatise on the meaning of the Roman liturgy.

The first chapter, "Manetti and the Art of Persuasion," describes the humanist's use of vocabulary, figures, and arguments in praising architectural projects, and distinguishes his aim of persuasion from the technical exposition of Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria. The next two chapters discuss Manetti's De pompis, a celebratory tract on the reconsecration of Florence cathedral as Santa Maria del Fiore (25 March 1436), and his Life of Nicholas V. The next three chapters discuss two of the pope's projects in Rome —the creation of a papal library and the enhancement of the Vatican palace —and analyze Manetti's strategies in celebrating them. The following two chapters concern the renovation of St. Peter's, and here the pope's building campaigns become a topic of controversy. Various Italians criticized the project as extravagant and wasteful —especially after the fall of Constantinople —but the major nemesis is the covert figure of Alberti, who earlier had played technician to Manetti the rhetorician. (This rivalry has been illuminated in Stefano Borsi's Alberti e Roma [2003], which the authors read too late to incorporate fully in their discussion; but both studies point in the same direction.) In fascinating pages, Alberti's Momus is redated and reinterpreted to offer a satirical look at Nicholas V's building projects. In the final chapter, the authors return to Manetti's description of St. Peter's as Nicholas V's apostolic temple, and they analyze the various metaphors —the human body, the microcosm, and the Ark —that the humanist employs in his panegyric. Manetti also draws upon tradition in comparing Nicholas to Solomon both as a "prince of peace" and for building his temple and palace, but he also praises Nicholas as a second Ptolemy (the founder of the Alexandrian Library). In their conclusion, the authors characterize Manetti as a learned layman, whose interpretation of ecclesiastical architecture is informed by Scholasticism, Platonism, and Augustine's view of history.

After the rich preamble of these chapters, the edition and translation of Manetti's texts threatens to prove anticlimactic. Indeed, the prose of De pompis ("processions" rather than "parades"?) is cumbersome and repetitive, and the editors' preference for minimal punctuation and emendation renders the Latin text less transparent. In the biography of Nicholas V, in turn, Manetti's epideictic style is predictably orotund, but his enthusiasm gradually shines through the...