Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City

Conclusion

Conclusion At the heart of Alberti’s writings, there is, as we have seen, a tension surrounding the issues of fame, glory, fate, fortuna, and virtù. Equally pressing, if not so explicitly articulated, is the issue of truth and the failure of appearance and reality to fully coincide. It is perhaps for this reason that Alberti sometimes has recourse to bizarre and visionary imagery. One senses a genuine attempt to get under the skin of things. The disturbing tale in which Charon describes a strange version of the Fall of Man is an example of precisely this kind of writing. Here, the attempt to penetrate the surface, to see beyond the skin, is almost literal, as Charon lifts the mask on a good portion of humanity. Scholars have, in recent years, been preoccupied with the notion of dissimulation in Alberti’s writings. Alberti treats the theme recurrently and insistently and, of course, engages in his own simulatio and dissimulatio. It is impossible not to find Alberti’s own face, to some extent, behind many of his characters’ masks: Lepidus, Philoponius, Gelastus, Momus, and others. As we have seen, Alberti seems to relish taking on these personae while simultaneously craving a world that is governed by transparency.Simulation anddissimulationappeartobethenecessarytoolsforaninhabitantofhuman societies—that is to say, of cities. The town versus country commonplace is employed as part of a polemic in this regard, one that reveals both the speech and the actions of men in cities to be altogether too complex to be trustworthy. As Momus discovers, simulation and dissimulation are essential for men of affairs who live among the multitude (intra multitudinem atque in negotio vivendum sit). It is the condition of being surrounded by dissimulators that necessitates dissimulation on one’s own part.1 The reference to men who are in negotio is important in this regard, since, as we have seen, business appears to embody many of the most problematic areas of urban life for Alberti. He conceives of the urban market as an inherently untrustworthy place in which people are tricked. More than CONCLUSION 189 that, however, it is a place where values begin to float freely, where a person passes his life into the hands of others, relying on objects with which he has no connection and of whose origin he is ignorant. He steps outside of the natural social bond of the family, into the far more contentious one of the city. Alberti’s treatment of commerce is nuanced, but it is fair to say that hefrequentlycharacterizesitastheantithesisofscholarship.Theexceptionally high value placed on scholarship by Alberti, an arch scholar himself, is hardly surprising. Yet he subjects even the discourse of the scholar to robust scrutiny, starting from the De commodis. Giannozzo and Adovardo’s exchange on the subject remains within the bounds of affability but is nonetheless tense. Alberti often appears skeptical of the ability of language to resolve the disjuncture between appearance and reality. One sometimes senses that he desires a radical clearing away of misleading appearances, a kind of apocalyptic destruction of falsehood. This occasionally enters into his writings in the form of violent imagery—for instance, Charon caulking his boat with clay from the dissolved masks of deceiving monsters and plaiting ropes from their hair.2 In the De iciarchia, Alberti again resorts to the imagery of the mutilation and destruction of the body when revealing deceiving “monsters,” asking, “Who can look upon a slanderous deprecator , a defamer, and not be horrified by his fury? Worst of men! They ought to be pursued by the entire populace, not, I say, with bow and arrows, but with ropes and flaming torches. They should be roasted until their bones are left entirely bare, so that no pretence may yet stay hidden within that monster.”3 Christine Smith has pointed out that the introduction to every book of Momus emphasizes the extent to which the protagonist imperiled the very fabric of the universe.4 Momus, we are told, “nearly drew men, gods and the whole machinery of the world into utter calamity.”5 Indeed, Alberti promises, “You will see how the salvation of mankind, the majesty of the gods and the government of the world were brought almost to a final crisis.”6 This destructive aspect of Momus—his preternatural ability to hasten the Apocalypse—must surely be connected with his role as truthteller .7 Momus’s irrepressible habit of blurting out the truth threatens to destabilize an entire order that is predicated on the fact that appearance...