Alexander by Edward Lucie-Smith (review)

Leonardo Reviews section includes reviews o f books,journals and otherprint publications, CD products , videos andfilms, software and new technologies, conferences, exhibitionsand other events in the field o f art, science and technology.Additional reviews can befound in Leonardo Electronic News, Leonardo Currents and theFineArt, Science and Technology (FAST)electronicdatabase. I BOOKS I ARCHITECTURE IN THE CULTURE OF EARLY HUMANISM by Christine Smith. Oxford Univ. Press, New York, NY,1992.$35.00. ISBN 0-19506128 -4. Reviewed by RudolfArnheim, I200 Earhart Road, #537, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, U.S.A. An erudite book of nine essays dealing with what the early Italian Humanists thought of architecture would seem to be reserved for the specialists. But it is in the nature of good thinkers in any field that they focus on the guiding ideas of their subject-ideas that remain pertinent through the ages. Christine Smith is one of those thinkers. Thus, dealing with the history of ideas in the early fifteenth century, she captures our attention by taking as a theme an apparent paradox of the period. It had become a commonplace to assume that the Renaissance rejected the tradition of medieval style and thought by returning to the Classicist ideals of antiquity. Why then would Leon Battista Alberti, the great architect and Humanistic theorist, introduce his book on painting with a dedicatory letter to Brunelleschi and center his architectural writings on Bmnelleschi’s masterpiece, the cathedral of Florence-a strictly Gothic building? torical assumptions, Smith discovered first of all that Alberti did not share the view that a fundamental distinction sep arated the Gothic from the Classicist style. Instead he saw a gradual develop ment through the centuries, with the Gothic of Quottrocento Florence considered , paradoxically, as the “modern” crowning of architecture. Alberti could not condemn the Gothic because for him “the category-whether formal, historical,or cultural4id not exist”(p.68).Therefore, saysSmith, it is most accurate to say that Alberti really In the course of revising accepted hisconceivedof only a single historical category or period, which had an earlier and a later phase. His “descriptivevocabulary is style-neutral;in characterizing the sup ports of the cathedral as slender, he does not tell us that they are Gothic piers instead of Classical columns” (p.60). Not that Alberti was unaware of the difference . But to him, the piers were quadrilateral columns. This strikesa familiar note in those of uswho object to the parceling up of the recent historyof art into snippets like modernism and postmodernism , rather than looking at the flow of its development. Another useful reminder comes from Smith’sdescription of the differentways in which the body of existingdisciplines should be approached as a whole. The scholarsof the West, concentrated in Italy, “increasinglycompartmentalized knowledge since the twelfth century,defining clear boundaries between the Various arts and sciences.Individual scholarswere expected to specializein only one branch of learning;further divisions occurred within each art” (p. 142).B y contrast,says Smith,the Eastern scholarsof Constantinople practiced a much greater union of disciplines.They knew two kinds of leaming, the inner or spiritual,dealing with the philosophyof sacred things,and the outer or secular,concerned with the sciences,mathematicsand rhetoric. The twowere complementary.Alberti’s account of the Florence cathedral can be called aesthetic to the extent that he did not concentrate on measurements and proportions but exemplifieda “newdesire to undeistand through sight,”which, according to Smith,was one of the most important concerns of the early Humanists (p.11).Alberti defined good architecture by its emotional and visual effecton the viewer, but in describingthis effecthe used the union of opposite qualities recommended by ancient rhetoric. The cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, he said,was distinguishedby the equilibrium of grace and majesty, fragility and strength, beauty and utility. Most of all, however,Alberti was impressed by Brunelleschi’sfeat of engineering , especially the much admired construction of the cathedral’scupola. To him, this was the tangible proof of society’sprogress, achieved by human creativity.Ingegno, as it was called, combined the original capacityto invent with the ability to apply scientificknowledge to practical problems (p. 30). This greatness of individual genius raised architecture above the mechanical arts, to which the...