Architettura e committenza da Alberti a Bramante (review)

The sixth centennial of the birth of Leon Battista Alberti was celebrated by numerous conferences, exhibitions, and publications, including the book here under review. The sheer volume of publications implies that everyone who had anything to say about Alberti has had their thoughts published. Among the multitude of authors represented in them, the most prolific is surely Christoph Frommel who has been writing about Renaissance architecture for some fifty years. In the preface to Architettura e committenza he says that he has turned his atten-tion to the architecture of the later fifteenth century to delineate the origins of Renaissance architecture of the sixteenth century, to which he has devoted most of his career.

The contents of Architettura e committenza consist of seven articles, all previously published, plus a preface written for this occasion. The subjects range from the remodeling of the late antique Church of San Stefano Rotondo in the early 1450s to the patronage of Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome of the 1480s. The longest of the seven pieces, by far, is the article, amounting to a substantial monograph, on Francesco del Borgo, whom Frommel identifies as architect to Popes Pius II and Paul II. Frommel justifies the republication of these pieces together because they show that development of Renaissance architecture in the later fifteenth century was largely a consequence of Leon Battista Alberti's work as architect and author of De re aedificatoria. The articles focus on items other than those that have been long attributed to Alberti himself. The purpose is to demonstrate the influence of Alberti's ideas working through others.

Frommel's thesis is hardly new, but he gives it vastly more substance than it ever had. Alberti appears in these pages as the tireless adviser of patrons, designer of buildings and urban spaces, teacher of architects, and inventor of most of the ideas that Renaissance architects would use from that time forward. Frommel grounds his arguments on abundant citations of documentary and physical evidence, on analyses of forms, and on passages quoted from De re aedificatoria. His argument has internal coherence, buttressed by a great quantity of detail; but, alas, Frommel lacks the facts he really needs. The documentary basis of Alberti's career in architecture is slight, and De re aedificatoria is of little help in making attributions. Frommel's argument depends, of necessity, upon assumptions and conjectures. His frequent use of forse and probabilmente in every other paragraph, it seems, gives rise to doubts. Are his assumptions and conjectures plausible, or even reasonable?

A detailed critique of Frommel's many complex arguments is impossible here, so one example must suffice. The much-studied city views in Berlin, Urbino, and Baltimore, are usually dated to the later 1470s, and they have been attributed to nine different artists. Frommel dates them variously to the late 1470s (Berlin), ca. 1485 (Urbino), and ca. 1490 (Baltimore), and attributes them to anonymous Florentine artists working from drawings by Giuliano da Sangallo, who was in turn using ideas of urbanism that Alberti had picked up from Brunelleschi and further developed. The three panels show much the same ideas about ideal new cities, but they were not made by the same artist, nor in the same milieu. The Baltimore panel is probably Florentine because its central temple is a version of the Baptistery of Florence with green-and-white marble revetments. The Urbino panel was painted by a much more capable artist, and its central temple is certainly not, as Frommel asserts, a classicizing variant of the Baptistery of Florence. It is a variant of several imaginative reconstructions of ancient Roman temples that a Sienese artist and architect named Francesco di Giorgio included in his first treatise on architecture (Turin, Biblioteca Reale, msc. Saluzzianus 148, fol. 84^r). The palaces flanking the piazza in which the temple stands are variants of other drawings in the same treatise. Because it...