A third group of Alberti's prose works consists of his essays on the arts.[256] One of these, the Treatise on Painting, was either written in Italian or translated by Alberti soon after its composition in Latin.[257] The Treatises on Perspective, Sculpture, Architecture and the Orders are supposed to have been rendered by their author from the Latin; but doubt still rests upon Alberti's share in this translation. It is not my present business to inquire into the subject-matter of his artistic essays, but rather to note the fact that Alberti should have thought it fitting to use Italian for at least the most considerable of them. We have already seen that his chief motive to composition was utility and that he recognized the need of bringing the results of learning within the scope of the unlettered laity. We need not doubt that this consideration weighed with him when he rehandled the matter of Vitruvius and Pliny for the use of handicraftsmen. Nothing is more striking in the whole series than the business-like simplicity of style, the avoidance of rhetoric, and the adaptation of each section to some practical end. We have not here to do with æsthetical criticism, but with the condensed experience of a student and workman. In his exposition of theory Alberti corresponds to the practice of Florence, where Ghirlandajo kept a bottega open to all comers, and Michelangelo began his apprenticeship by grinding colors.

Though the subject of these essays lies beyond the scope of my work, it is impossible to pass over the dedication to Filippo Brunelleschi, which is prefixed to the Italian version of the Pittura. Alberti begins by saying that the wonder and sorrow begotten in him by reflecting on the loss of many noble arts and sciences, had led him to believe that Nature, wearied and out-worn, had no force left to generate the giant spirits of her youth. "But when I returned from the long exile in which we of the Alberti have grown old, to this our mother-city, which exceeds all others in the beauty of her monuments, I perceived that many living men, but first of all you, Filippo, and our dearest friend the sculptor Donatello, and Lorenzo Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia and Masaccio, were not of less account for genius and noble work than any ancient artist of great fame." After some remarks upon industry and the advantages of scientific theory, he proceeds: "Who is there so hard and envious of temper as not to praise the architect Filippo, when he saw so vast a structure, raised above the heavens, spacious enough to cover with its shadow all the Tuscan folks, built without any aid from beams and scaffoldings, a miracle of art, if I judge rightly, which might in this age have been deemed impossible, and which even among the ancients was perhaps unknown, undreamed of?" After this exordium, he commits to Brunelleschi's care his little book on painting, quale a tuo nome feci in lingua toscana. The interest of this dedication lies not only in the mention of the five chief quattrocento artists by Alberti, and in the record of the impression first produced on him by Florence, but also in the recognition that, great as were the dead arts of antiquity, the modern arts of Italy could rival them. It is an intuition parallel to that which induced Alberti to compose the Famiglia in Italian, and proves that he could endure the blaze of humanism without blindness.

In the fourth group of Alberti's prose-works we come across a new vein of semi-moral, semi-satirical reflection. These are devoted to love and matrimony, giving rhetorical expression to the misogynistic side of the Novelle. Alberti professes himself a master in the lore of love. He knows its symptoms, diagnoses and describes the stages of the malady, and pretends to intimate acquaintance with the foibles of both sexes. Yet we seem to feel that his knowledge is rather literary than real, derived from books and pranked with a scholastic show of borrowed learning. Two lectures addressed by women to their own sex on the art of love, take the first place in this series. The one is called Ecatomfila, or the lady of the hundred loves; the other Amiria, or the lady of the myriad.[258] The former tells her female audience what kind of lover to choose, neither too young nor too old, not too rich nor yet too handsome; how to keep him, and in what way to make the most of the precious acquisition. She is comparatively modest, and the sort of passion she implies may pass for virtuous. Yet her large experience of men proves she has arrived at wisdom after many trials. Her virtue is a matter of prudent egoism. Amiria takes a different line. Heliogabalus might have used her precepts in his Concio ad Meretrices. Her discourse turns upon the subsidiary aids to beauty and the arts of coquetry. Recipes for hair-dyes, depilatories, eye-lotions, tooth-powders, soaps, lip-salves, ointments, cosmetics, skin-preservers, wart-destroyers, pearl-powders, rouges, are followed up with sound advice about craft, fraud, force, feigned passion, entangling manœuvres, crocodile tears, and secrecy in self-indulgence. The sustained irony of this address, and the minute acquaintance with the least laudable secrets of an Italian lady's toilet it reveals, place it upon the list of literary curiosities. Did any human beings ever plaster their faces with such stuff as Amiria gravely recommends?[259]

The Deifira is a dialogue on the cure of a distempered passion, which adds but little to Ovid's Remedium Amoris; while two short treatises on marriage only prove that Alberti took the old Simonidean view of there being at least nine bad women to one good one.[260] His misogyny, whether real or affected, reaches its climax in an epistle to Paolo Codagnello, which combines the worst things said by Boccaccio in the Corbaccio with Lucian's satire on female uncleanliness in the Amores.[261] The tirade appears to be as serious as possible, and, indeed, Alberti's generalities might be illustrated ad libitum from the Novelle. It is no wonder that women resented his treatment of them; and one of his most amusing lesser tracts is a dialogue between himself and a lady called Sofrona, who took him to task for this very epistle. In answer to her reproaches he is ceremoniously polite. He also gives her the last word in the argument, not without a stroke of humor. "It is all very well of you, men of letters, to take our characters away, so long as we can rule our husbands and make choice of lovers when and how we choose. All you men run after us; and if you do but see a pretty girl, you stand as stock still as a statue."[262] After this fashion runs Sofrona's reply.

Alberti's misogynistic essays remind us how very difficult it is to understand or explain the tone of popular literature in that century with regard to women. That the Novelle were written to amuse both sexes seems clear; and we must imagine that the women who read so much vituperation of their manners, regarded it as a conventional play with words. Like Sofrona, they knew their satirists to be fair husbands, fathers, brothers, and, in the capacity of lovers, ludicrously blind to their defects. The current abuse of women, in which Petrarch no less than Alberti and Boccaccio indulged, seems to have been a scholastic survival of the coarse and ignorant literature of the medieval clergy. Cloistered monks indulged their taste for obscenity, and indemnified themselves for self-imposed celibacy, by grossly insulting the mothers who bore them and the institution they administered as a sacrament.[263] Their invective tickled the vulgar ear, and passed into popular literature, where it held its own as a commonplace, not credited with too much meaning by folk who knew the world.

The pretty story of Ippolito and Leonora, could we believe it to be Alberti's, might pass for a palinode to these misogynistic treatises.[264] It is the tale of two Florentine lovers, born in hostile houses, and brought after a series of misadventures, to the fruition of honorable love in marriage. The legend must have been very popular. Besides the prose version, in which the lovers are called Ippolito de' Buondelmonti and Leonora de' Bardi, we have a poem in ottava rima, where the heroine's name becomes Dianora. A Latin translation of the same novel was produced by Paolo Cortesi, with the title Hyppolyti et Deyaniræ Historia. But since Alberti's authorship has not been clearly proved, it is more prudent to class both Italian versions among those anonymous products of popular literature which will form the topic of my next [chapter].

Of Alberti's poems few survive; and these have no great literary value. Out of the three serious sonnets, one beginning Io vidi già seder deserves to be studied for a certain rapidity of movement and mystery of emotion.[265] It might be compared to an allegorical engraving by some artist of the sixteenth century—Robeta or the Master of the Caduceus. Two burlesque sonnets in reply to Burchiello have this interest, that they illustrate a point of literary contact between the people and the cultivated classes. But, on the whole, the Sestines and the Elegy of Agiletta must be reckoned Alberti's best performances in verse.[266] Here his gnomic wisdom finds expression in pregnant, almost epigrammatic utterances. There are passages in the Agiletta, weighty with packed sentences, which remind an English reader of Bacon's lines on human life.[267] Still it is the poetry of a man largely gifted, but not born to be a singer. It may be worth adding to this brief notice of Alberti's rhymes, that he essayed Latin meters in Italian. The following elegiac couplet belongs to him[268]:

Questa per estremo miserabile epistola mando
A te che spregi miseramente noi.

It is not worth printing. But it illustrates that endeavor to fuse the forms of ancient with the material of modern art, which underlay Alberti's practical experiments in architecture.