Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice (review)

As the authors point out in their preface, Pope Nicholas V (1447–55) was the first pope "to reside permanently at the Vatican rather than at Rome's cathedral, St. John Lateran." This book is a study of Nicholas V's grand building projects as explained by his biographer, the humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459). The title,however, does not quite reveal what the book contains. To be complete, it should have included the names not only of Nicholas V, the central actor in the enterprise, but also of the great humanist architectural theoretician Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), who, while seemingly always lurking in the background, puts in numerous overt appearances as the authors make him a counterpoint to Manetti's architectural language and Manetti's and Nicholas's vision and goals. (I cannot say how often the authors refer to Alberti because one of the defects of the book is its lack of an index.)

To be sure, Manetti predominates. The last third of the volume consists of an edition with English translation and extensive commentary of three of his works: De Secularibus et Pontificalibus Pompis (a description of Pope Eugenius IV's dedication of the cathedral of Florence on March 25,1436), Liber Secundus de Vita ac Gestis Nicolai Quinti (book 2 of Manetti's Life of Pope Nicholas V, describing the pope's revolutionary building program in Rome), and an excerpt from Nicholas V's testament as found in book 3 of De Vita ac Gestis dealing with the building program. Furthermore, Manetti is the sole focus or an important element of the nine chapters that constitute the first 300 pages. In these chapters as well as in the translations and the commentaries, the authors make a major contribution to our understanding of Manetti's architectural vocabulary (e.g., demonstrating that Manetti used solum to mean a leveled platform for building). I also agree with their general analysis of Manetti's Weltanschauung, though I think they were I to apply to Manetti the self-serving comparison of Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla of a modern Vallalatorist, Salvatore Camporeale (p. 14). Since Anna Modigliani's critical edition of Manetti's biography of Nicholas V came out in 2005, their Latin text was superseded even before it appeared. The largest defect of their edition is the failure to take into account MS Pal. Lat. 868 of the Vatican Library, probably corrected by Manetti himself. The damage, fortunately, is limited in that one of the Florentine manuscripts used (Plut. 66, 23 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana) is itself authoritative.

Smith and O'Connor are quite convincing in demonstrating that Nicholas V's overarching concern was security and that in his mind "[t]he Vatican Palace was not, in other words, a miniature city but the fortress of a tyrant" (p. 165). They are excellent as a corrective to the misinterpretations of Carroll William Westfall's "In This Most Perfect Paradise" (Baltimore, 1973). They also bring out well the biblical inspiration of many of the details of Nicholas's building campaign ("Nicholas's authority is King Solomon as architect/patron," p. 219) and in showing that "[t]he most fundamental decision Nicholas made was to establish the level of the crest of the Mons Saccorum [an eastern spur of the Vatican Hill] as the 'building platform' of the Vatican Palace" (p. 189). Their richly annotated chapter on Nicholas's library would seem at first blush to be a bit far afield, but it fits well within their analysis of Manetti and Nicholas, although their lack of expertise sometimes is evident, such as their assertion that Niccolò Perotti obtained codices in Trebizond (p. 92) or their supposition that Nicholas...