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

3. The Limits of Power

In the previous chapter, we saw Alberti consider stern architectural intervention in the city, physically preventing the populace from rising up against its masters. This discussion may be connected to a critique of the policies of Nicholas V in Rome. Yet there is also a modern and calculated aspect to Alberti’s discussion, something approaching a science of power, insofar as it ostensibly claims a kind of dispassionate objectivity. Burroughs is right when he asserts that the divided city is not in fact an ideal city or a feasible project. As has been said, Alberti does not at any stage describe one single ideal city, and many of his proposals would be contradictory.1 Nevertheless, the divided city does represent a kind of ideal political situation or system. It may not be a feasible or a desirable project, but it illustrates an ideal set of power relations and stands as an example of the capacity of architecture to enforce a political order. Eugenio Garin has made some useful remarks concerning Alberti in this context.2 Commenting on the divided city, he observes that, in point of fact, [Alberti] makes a distinction between the new principalities and kingdoms and the free republics. The new principalities must seek refuge in the mountains and defend themselves with fear and suspicion, while the free populations may inhabit the comfortable cities in the plain. But apart from this, Alberti’s town is built T H E L I M I T S O F P O W E R 3 THE LIMITS OF POWER 87 to stress class differences, and to accommodate a precise political structure within its walls and buildings. Thus the architect becomes the regulator and coordinator of all the town’s activities according to a free restatement of the Aristotelian concept. Alberti presents architecture as the art of arts, the queen and the sum of all others. Town planning is not just connected with politics, it is part and parcel of political activity, almost its highest expression.3 Garin goes on to quote Alberti’s famous definition of the architect, given in the prologue to De re aedificatoria: “Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man, by the movement of weights and the joining and massing of bodies. To do this he must have an understanding and knowledge of all the highest and most noble disciplines.”4 Alberti thus describes the architect as a man who requires extensive knowledge of all sorts of matters, although he later restricts this considerably .5 As Garin says, throughout the treatise, Alberti stresses the allencompassing nature of architecture, its ability to regulate and to transform almost every facet of life. Indeed, one cannot help but be struck by the extent of the architect’s terrain in De re, as evidenced by the sheer number of matters that are discussed. We should remember that Alberti’s was the first treatise on architecture since ancient times. In this sense, he is trying to recover an order of knowledge from a multitude of fragments—literally the fragments of buildings and texts. Yet the treatise does not feel like a mere exercise in recovery but rather like the creation of something autonomous and self-sufficient, something that is new. Alberti, one senses, is offering an entire plank to the swimmers in the river of life, and it promises to be the most important of all. Alberti was clearly aware that the order of knowledge in which he dealt could constitute a kind of power and that those who exercised power would find it of interest.6 Throughout the Momus, the architect is counterposed to the philosopher as a figure who likewise has a claim to profound knowledge, not just about building but also about the running and governing of things.7 As Anthony Grafton has effectively demonstrated, Alberti had to be ever mindful of his career, and his treatise must, in part, be seen as a demonstration of the feats that architects could perform for the rulers 88 HUMANISM AND THE URBAN WORLD of cities. To that extent, it is like a long and elaborate equivalent of the famous letter that Leonardo da Vinci sent to Ludovico Sforza, detailing the wonders he could perform...