Abstract

This article investigates Alberti’s relation to Italian humanist ideas around 1450, as they pertain to the dialogue between classical erudition and religious insight. The key source in this investigation is Alberti’s Latin novel Momus. While scholars have often interpreted this work as a commentary on the papal court of Nicholas V, to which Alberti belonged, the essay argues that it shows Alberti’s critique of humanist thinking on holiness. This critique emerges through the work’s variant of the Prometheus myth. Comparing the rendering of this myth in the Momus with allegorical readings of the Prometheus story by Giovanni Boccaccio and Marsilio Ficino, we may observe how Alberti took issue with other humanists’ assertion of enlightened reason, symbolized by Promethean fire. Alberti looked skeptically at the epistemological and ontological claims that supported Renaissance humanist allegorism, seeing in these imaginings more the absence or withdrawal of the divine rather than its manifestation.

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