Renaissance in Italy, Volume 4 (of 7) / Italian Literature, Part 1

by John Addington Symonds

The date of Alberti's birth is uncertain. But we may fix it probably at about the year 1405. He was born at Venice, where his father, exiled with the other members of his noble house by the Albizzi, had taken refuge. After Cosimo de' Medici's triumph over the Albizzi in 1434, Leo Battista returned to Florence.[216] It was as a Florentine citizen that his influence in restoring the vulgar literature to honor, was destined to be felt. He did not, however, reside continuously in the city of his ancestors, but moved from town to town, with a restlessness that savored somewhat of voluntary exile. It is, indeed, noteworthy how many of the greatest Italians—Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Alberti, Lionardo, Tasso: men who powerfully helped to give the nation intellectual coherence—were wanderers. They sought their home and saw their spiritual patria in no one abiding-place.[217] Thus, amid the political distractions of the Italian people, rose that ideal of unity to which Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, Ferrara contributed, but which owned no metropolis. Florence remained to the last the brain of Italy. Yet Florence, by stepmotherly ingratitude, by Dante's exile, by the alienation of Petrarch, by Alberti's homeless boyhood, prepared for the race a new culture, Tuscan in origin, national by diffusion and assimilation. Alberti died at Rome in 1472, just when Poliziano, a youth of eighteen, was sounding the first notes of that music which re-awakened the Muse of Tuscany from her long sleep, and gave new melodies to Italy.

In his proemium to the Third Book of the Family, addressed to Francesco degli Alberti, Leo Battista enlarges on the duty of cultivating the mother tongue.[218] After propounding the question whether the loss of the empire acquired by their Roman ancestors—l'antiquo nostro imperio amplissimo—or the loss of Latin as a spoken language—l'antiqua nostra gentilissima lingua latina—had been the greater privation to the Italian race, he gives it as his opinion that, though the former robbed them of imperial dignity, the latter was the heavier misfortune. To repair that loss is the duty of one who had made literature his study. If he desires to benefit his fellow-countrymen, he will not use a dead language, imperfectly comprehended by a few learned men, but will bend the idiom of the people to the needs of erudition. "I willingly admit," he argues, "that the ancient Latin tongue is very copious and of beauty polished to perfection. Yet I do not see what our Tuscan has in it so hateful that worthy matter, when conveyed thereby, should be displeasing to us." Pedants who despise their mother speech, are mostly men incapable of expressing themselves in the latter; "and granted they are right in saying that the ancient tongue has undisputed authority, because so many learned men have employed it, the like honor will certainly be paid our language of to-day, if men of culture take the pains to purify and polish it." He then declares that, meaning to be useful to the members of his house, and to bequeath a record of their ancient dignity to their descendants, he has resolved to choose the tongue in which he will be generally understood.

This proemium explains Alberti's position in all his Italian writings. Aiming at the general good, convinced that a living nation cannot use a dead language with dignity and self-respect, he makes the sacrifice of a scholar's pride to public utility, and has the sense to perceive that the day of erudite exclusiveness is over. No one felt more than Alberti the greatness of the antique Roman race. No one was prouder of his descent from those patricians of the Commonwealth, who tamed and ruled the world. The memory of that Roman past, which turned the generation after Dante into a nation of students, glowed in Alberti's breast with more than common fervor.[219] The sonorous introduction to the first book of the Family reviews the glories of the Empire and the decadence of Rome with a pomp of phrase, a passion of eloquence, that stir our spirit like the tramp of legions waking echoes in a ruined Roman colonnade.[220] Yet in spite of this devotion to the past, Alberti, like Villani, felt that his Italians of the modern age had destinies and auspices apart from those of ancient Rome. He was resolved to make the speech of that new nation, heiress of the Latin name, equal in dignity to Cicero's and Livy's. What Rome had done, Rome's children should do again. But the times were changed, and Alberti was a true son of the Renaissance. He approached his task in the spirit of a humanist. His style is over-charged with Latinisms; his periods are cumbrous; his matter is loaded with citations and scholastic instances drawn from the repertories of erudition.[221] The vivida vis of inspiration fails. His work is full of reminiscences. The golden simplicity of the trecento yields to a studied effort after dignity of diction, culture of amplitude. Still the writer's energy is felt in massive paragraphs of powerful declamation. His eloquence does not degenerate into frothy rhetoric; and when he wills, he finds pithy phrases to express the mind of a philosopher and poet. That he was born and reared in exile accounts for a lack of racy Tuscan in his prose; and the structure of his sentences proves that he had been accustomed to think in Latin before he made Italian serve his turn.[222] Still, though for these and other reasons his works were not of the kind to animate a nation, they are such as still may be read with profit and with pleasure by men who seek for solid thoughts in noble diction.

Alberti's principal prose work, the Trattato della Famiglia, was written to instruct the members of his family in the customs of their ancestors, and to perpetuate those virtues of domestic life which he regarded as the sound foundation of a commonwealth. The first three books are said to have been composed within the space of ninety days in Rome, and the fourth added at a later period.[223] It is a dialogue, the interlocutors being relatives of the Alberti blood. Nearly all the illustrative matter is drawn from the biographies of their forefathers. The scene is laid at Padua, and the essay contains frequent allusions to their exile.[224] No word of invective against the Albizzi who had ruined them, no vituperation of the city which had permitted the expulsion of her sons, escapes the lips of any of the speakers. The grave sadness that tempers the whole dialogue, is marred by neither animosity nor passion. Yet though the Family was written in exile for exiles, the ideal of domestic life it paints, is Florentine.[225] Taken in its whole extent, this treatise is the most valuable document which remains to us from the times of the oligarchy, when Florence was waging war with the Visconti, and before the Medici had based their despotism upon popular favor. From its pages a tolerably complete history of a great commercial family might be extracted; and this study would form a valuable commentary on the public annals of the commonwealth during the earlier portion of the fifteenth century.[226]

The first book of the Famiglia deals with the duties of the elder to the younger members of the household, and the observance owed by sons and daughters to their parents. It is an essay De Officiis within the circle of the home, embracing minute particulars of conduct, and suggesting rules for education from the cradle upwards.[227] The second book takes up the question of matrimony. The respective ages at which the sexes ought to marry, the moral and physical qualities of a good wife, the maintenance of harmony between a wedded couple, their separate provinces and common duty to the State in the procreation of children, are discussed with scientific completeness. The third book, modeled on the Œconomicus of Xenophon, is devoted to thrift. How to use our personal faculties, our wealth, and our time to best advantage, forms its principal theme. The fourth book treats of friendship—family connections and alliances, the usefulness of friends in good and evil fortune, the mutual benefits enjoyed by men who live honestly together in a social state.[228] It may be seen from this sketch that the architecture of the treatise is complete and symmetrical. The first book establishes the principles of domestic morality on which a family exists and flourishes. The second provides for its propagation through marriage. The third shows how its resources are to be distributed and preserved. The fourth explains its relations to similar communities existing in an organized society. Many passages in the essay have undoubtedly the air of truisms; but this impression of commonplaceness is removed by the strong specific character of all the illustrations. Alberti's wisdom is common to civilized humanity. His conception of life is such as only suits a Florentine, and his examples are drawn from the annals of a single family.

I have already dwelt at some length in a former volume on the most celebrated section of this treatise—the Padre di Famiglia or the Economico.[229] To repeat those observations here would be superfluous. Yet I cannot avoid a digression upon a matter of much obscurity relating to the authorship of that book.[230] Until recently, this discourse upon the economy of a Florentine household passed under the name of Agnolo Pandolfini, and was published separately as his undoubted work. The interlocutors in the dialogue, which bore the title of Governo della Famiglia, are various members of the Pandolfini family, and all allusions to the Alberti and their exile are wanting. The style of the Governo differs in many important respects from that of Alberti; and yet the arrangement of the material and the substance of each paragraph are so closely similar in both forms of the treatise as to prove that the work is substantially identical. Pandolfini's essay, which I shall call Il Governo, passes for one of the choicest monuments of ancient Tuscan diction. Alberti's Economico, though it is more idiomatic than the rest of his Famiglia, betrays the Latinisms of a scholar. It is clear from a comparison of the two treatises either that Alberti appropriated Pandolfini's Governo, brought its style into harmony with his own, and gave it a place between the second and the fourth books of his essay on the Family; or else that this third book of Alberti's Famiglia was rewritten by an author who commanded a purer Italian. In the former case, Alberti changed the dramatis personæ by substituting members of his own house for the Pandolfini. In the latter case, the anonymous compiler paid a similar compliment to the Pandolfini by such alterations as obliterated the Alberti, and presented the treatise to the world as part of their own history. That Agnolo Pandolfini was himself guilty of this plagiarism is rendered improbable by a variety of circumstances. Yet the problem does not resolve itself into the simple question whether Pandolfini or Alberti was the plagiary. Supposing Alberti to have been the original author, there is no difficulty in believing that the Governo was a redaction made from his work by some anonymous hand in honor of the Pandolfini family. On the contrary, if we assume Agnolo Pandolfini to have been the author, then Alberti himself was guilty of a gross and open plagiarism.[231]

It will be useful to give some account of the MSS. upon which the editions of the Governo and the Economico are based.[232] In the first edition of the Governo (Tartini e Franchi, Firenze, 1734) six codices are mentioned. Of these the Codex Pandolfini A, on which the editors chiefly relied, has been removed from Italy to Paris. The Codex Pandolfini B was written in 1476 at Poggibonsi by a certain Giuliano di Niccolajo Martini. Whether the Codex Pandolfini A professed to be an autograph copy, I do not know; but the editors of 1734, referring to it, state that the Senator Filippo Pandolfini, member of the Della Crusca, corrected the errors, restored the text, and improved the diction of the treatise by the help of a still more ancient MS. This admission on their part is significant. It opens, for the advocates of Alberti's authorship, innumerable suspicions as to the part played by Filippo Pandolfini in the preparation of the Governo. Nor can it be denied that the lack of an autograph of the Governo renders the settlement of the disputed question very difficult.

Of Alberti's Trattato della Famiglia we have three autograph copies; (i) Cod. Magl. Classe iv. No. 38 in folio; (ii) Riccardiana 1220; (iii) Riccardiana 176. The first of these is the most important; but it presents some points of singularity. In the first place, the third book, which is the Economico, has been inserted into the original codex, and shows a different style of writing. In the second place, the first two books contain numerous corrections, additions, erasures and recorrections, obviously made by Alberti himself. Some of the interpolated passages in the first two books are found to coincide with parts of the Governo; and Signor Cortesi, to whose critical Study I have already referred, argues with great show of reason that Alberti, when he determined to incorporate the Governo in his Famiglia, enriched the earlier books of that essay with fragments which he did not find it convenient to leave in their original place. Still it should be remembered that this argument can be reversed; for the anonymous compiler of the Governo, if he had access to Alberti's autograph, may have chosen to appropriate sentences culled from the earlier portions of the Famiglia.

It is noticeable that the Economico, even though it forms the third book of the Treatise on the Family, has a separate title and a separate introduction, with a dedication to Francesco Alberti, and a distinct peroration.[233] It is, in fact, an independent composition, and occurs in more than one MS. of the fifteenth century detached from the rest of the Famiglia. In style it is far freer and more racy than is usual with Alberti's writing. Of this its author seems to have been aware; for he expressly tells his friend and kinsman Francesco that he has sought to approach the purity and simplicity of Xenophon.[234]

The anonymous writer of Alberti's life says that he composed three books on the Family at Rome before he was thirty, and a fourth book three years later. If we follow Tiraboschi in taking 1414 for the date of his birth, the first three books must have been composed before 1444 and the fourth in 1447. The former of these dates (1444) receives some confirmation from a Latin letter written by Leonardo Dati to Alberti, acknowledging the Treatise on the Family, in June 1443. Dati tells him that he finds fault with the essay for being composed "in a more majestic and perhaps a harsher style, especially in the first book, than the Florentine language and the judgment of the laity would tolerate." He goes on, however, to observe that "afterwards the language becomes far more sweet and satisfactory to the ear"—a criticism which seems to suit the altered manner of the third book. With reference to the date 1447, in which the Famiglia may have been completed, Cortesi remarks that Pandolfini died in 1446. He suggests that, upon this event, Alberti appropriated the Governo and rewrote it, and that the Economico, though it holds the place of the third book in the treatise, is really the fourth book mentioned by the anonymous biographer. The suggestion is ingenious; and if we can once bring ourselves to believe that Alberti committed a deliberate act of larceny, immediately after his friend Pandolfini's death, then the details which have been already given concerning the autograph of the Famiglia and the discrepancies in its style of composition add confirmation to the theory. There are, however, good reasons for assigning Alberti's birth to the year 1404 or even 1402.[235] In that case Alberti's Roman residence would fall into the third decade of the century, and the last book of the Famiglia (which I am inclined to believe is the one now called the third) would have been composed before Pandolfini's death. That Alberti kept his MSS. upon the stocks and subjected them to frequent revision is certain; and this may account for one reference occurring in it to an event which happened in 1438.