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Alberti, in a number of works, characterizes the country and the city as binary opposites. Not only is each the antithesis of the other, but one is often judged to be superior—namely, the country. It is a fact that has every appearance of being thoroughly banal. Such sentiments were already common currency in antique literature. The opposition between town and country, urban and rural, is a literary trope, a familiar topos, among the most common of commonplaces. As such, it is connected more to literature than to the realities of rural life or to town-country relations; when it is deployed by a humanist, one is likely to find out more about writing than farming. By the fifteenth century, the topos was already sufficiently well worn to become a target for satire.1 It would not be unreasonable to conclude that when Alberti writes in this vein, there is not much to be learned either from or about him. His “preference” for the country is exactly what one would expect. It is a literary exercise, an imitation of the antique for its own sake, quite transparent to anyone who knows their genres. Such passages of writing cannot be treated as documents that contain reliable information about what went on in the country or about Alberti’s “real” attitude toward it. Alberti, it is sometimes argued, was simply saying the kind of thing that “everyone” said, and to attach any real significance to it would be naïve. This view involves an oversimplification. Alberti’s imitation of the antique is not in dispute, nor is his propensity for polished allusion and B E Y O N D T H E C I T Y 4 BEYOND THE CITY 107 literary play. His discussion of town-country relations is self-conscious and formulaic, just as we might expect. But this does not tell us everything there is to know about it or even very much. It should hardly require stating , but something’s being a topos does not render it devoid of meaning. The literary waters in which Alberti swam were thick with commonplaces; it is their adoption and use that should interest us. Of course, many commonplaces become such because they express sentiments that are fundamental to a culture’s thinking, ideas that maintain their currency across time. Alberti was part of a literary culture that sought to create a modern form of writing that was, ironically, based on the antique.We should hardly be surprised that he and his contemporaries adopted not just antique words but entire blocks of language, thoughts, and arguments. The recognition that Alberti himself characterized his work as the assemblage of fragments has formed the basis of an entire, and very fruitful, scholarly approach to his writings. There is a temptation to view Alberti as if the identification of his sources is the proper end of reading his work, either an end in itself or perhaps an activity that is sufficient to reveal the “meaning.” As we have seen in previous chapters, there is certainly much to be gained from such identification. Yet ultimately, the text is not reducible to the sum of its sources. It constitutes a different entity—one that is animated by a logic of its own. As Rinaldo Rinaldi has put it, in the act of identifying sources, scholars risk arriving at the same outcome as Democritus does in the third book of Momus. Here, the philosopher “dissects and identifies the parts of an animal, without, however, succeeding in finding the brain.”2 Alberti’s writing must be read, above all, with a view to its overall coherence and that, while we must pay attention to topoi, we cannot simply dismiss large sections of his work as mere literary play. After all, all language is made up of other language, and this need not overly alarm us. Closely related to these considerations is the issue of the degree to which Alberti’s statements correspond with an actual state of affairs. Is his account of the country somehow diminished if it is not entirely true or accurate? Does it become correspondingly less meaningful or less interesting ? Certainly, any attempt to use Alberti’s writings to gain an accurate sociohistorical picture of central Italian rural life in the fifteenth century would not fare well. But this is not the object of this chapter or indeed this book. Rather, we are concerned here with Alberti’s thought, specifically his urban thought. Ultimately, it is...

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