It may seem that too much attention has already been given to Alberti and his works. Yet when we consider his peculiar position in the history of the Renaissance, when we remember the singular beauty of his character, and reflect that, first among the humanists of mark, he deigned to labor for the public and to cultivate his mother tongue, a certain disproportion in the space allotted him may be excused. What his immediate successors in the field of erudition thought of him, can be gathered from a passage in Poliziano's preface to the first edition of his work on Architecture.[269] "To praise the author is beyond the narrow limits of a letter, beyond the poor reach of my powers of eloquence. Nothing, however abstruse in learning, however remote from the ordinary range of scholarship, was hidden from his genius. One might question whether he was better fitted for oratory or for poetry, whether his speech was the more weighty or the more polished." These great qualities Alberti placed freely at the service of the unlettered laity. He is therefore the hero of that age which I have called the period of transition.
In Alberti, moreover, we study the best type of the Italian intellect as it was molded, on emergence from the middle ages, by those double influences of humanism and fine art which determined the Renaissance. Though his genius was rather artistic than scientific, all problems of nature and of man attracted him; and he dealt freely with them in the spirit of true modern curiosity. His method shows no trace either of mystical theology or of crooked scholasticism. He surveyed the world with a meditative but observant glance, avoiding the deeper questions of ontology, and depicting what he noticed with the realism of a painter. This powerful pictorial faculty made his sketches from contemporary life—the description of the gambler in the Deiciarchia; the portrait of the sage in the Teogenio; the domestic colloquies of Giannozzo with his wife in the Famiglia; the interior of a coquette's chamber in the Amiria—surprising for sincerity and fullness. As a writer, he has the same merit that we recognize in Masaccio and Ghirlandajo among the fresco-painters of that age. But Alberti's touch is more sympathetic, his humanity more loving.
He was not eminent as a metaphysician. From Plato he only borrowed something of his literary art, and something of ethical elevation, leaving to Ficino the mysticism which then passed for Platonic science. His ideal of the virtuous man is a Florence burgher, honorable but keen in business, open to culture of all kinds, untainted by the cynicism that marred Cosimo de' Medici, lacking the licentious traits of the Novelle. Alberti's Padre di Famiglia might have stepped from the walls of the Riccardi Chapel or the Choir of S. Maria Novella, in his grave red lucco, with the cold and powerful features. The life praised above all others by Alberti is the life of a meditative student, withdrawn from State affairs, and corresponding with men of a like tranquil nature. This ideal was realized by Sannazzaro in his Mergellina, by Ficino at Montevecchio, by Pico at Querceto. Just as his science and his philosophy were æsthetic, so were his religion and his morality. He conformed to the ceremonies of the Catholic Church. But the religious sentiment had already become in him rational rather than emotional, and less a condition of the conscience than of the artistic sensibility. Honor in men, honesty in women, moved his admiration because they are comely. The splendor of the stars, the loveliness of earth, raised him in thought to the supreme source of beauty. Whatever the genius of man brings to perfection of grace, he called divine, realizing for the first time the piety that finds God in the human spirit.[270]
The harmonious lines and the vast spaces of the Florentine Duomo thrilled him like music, merging the charm of art in the high worship of a cultivated nature. "This temple," he writes in a passage that might be quoted as the quintessential exposition of his mind,[271] "has in it both grace and majesty, and I delight to notice that union of slender elegance with full and vigorous solidity, which shows that while every member is designed to please, the whole is built for perpetuity. Inside these aisles there is the climate of eternal spring—wind, frost, and rime without; a quiet and mild air within—the blaze of summer on the square; delicious coolness here. Above all things I delight in feeling the sweetness of those voices busied at the sacrifice, and in the sacred rites our classic ancestors called mysteries. All other modes and kinds of singing weary with reiteration; only religious music never palls. I know not how others are affected; but for myself, those hymns and psalms of the Church produce on me the very effect for which they were designed, soothing all disturbance of the soul, and inspiring a certain ineffable languor full of reverence toward God. What heart of man is so rude as not to be softened when he hears the rhythmic rise and fall of those voices, complete and true, in cadences so sweet and flexible? I assure you that I never listen in these mysteries and funeral ceremonies to the Greek words which call on God for aid against our human wretchedness, without weeping. Then, too, I ponder what power music brings with it to soften us and soothe."
It would be difficult with greater spontaneity and truth to delineate the emotions stirred in an artistic nature by the services of a cathedral. It is the language, however, not of a devout Christian, but one who, long before Goethe, had realized the Goethesque ideal of "living with fixed purpose in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful."
Alberti both in his width of genius and in his limitations—in his all-embracing curiosity and aptitude for knowledge, his sensitiveness to every charm, his strong practical bias, the realism of his pictures, the objectivity of his style, his indifference to theology and metaphysic, the largeness of his love for all things that have grace, the substitution of æsthetical for moral standards, the purity of his taste, the tranquillity and urbanity of his spirit, his Stoic-Epicurean acceptance of the world where man may be content to dwell and build himself a home of beauty—was a true representative of his age. What attracts us in the bronze-work of Ghiberti, in the bass-reliefs of Della Robbia, in Rossellino's sleeping Cardinal di Portogallo, in Ghirlandajo's portraits and the airy space of Masaccio's backgrounds, in the lives of Ficino and Pomponio Leto, in the dome of Brunelleschi, in the stanzas of Poliziano, arrives at consciousness in Alberti, pervades his writing, and finds unique expression in the fragment of his Latin biography. Yet we must not measure the age of Cosimo de' Medici and Roderigo Borgia by the standard of Alberti. He presents the spirit of the fifteenth century at its very best. Philosophical and artistic sympathy compensate in his religion for that period's lack of pious faith. Its political degradation assumes in him the shape of a fastidious retirement from vulgar strife. Its lawlessness, caprice, and violence are regulated by the motto "Nothing overmuch" which forms the keystone of his ethics. Its realism is tempered by his love for man and beast and tree—that love which made him weep when he beheld the summer fields and labors of the husbandman. Its sensuality finds no place in his harmonious nature. Many defects of the century are visible enough in Alberti; but what redeemed Italy from corruption and rendered her capable of great and brilliant work amid the chaos of States ruining in infidelity and vice—that free energy of the intellect, open to all influences, inventive of ideas, creative of beauty, which ennobled her Renaissance—burned in him with mild and tranquil radiance.
This is perhaps the fittest place to notice a remarkable book, which, though it cannot be reckoned among the masterpieces of Italian literature, is too important in its bearing on the history of the Renaissance to be passed in silence. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or "Poliphil's Strife of Love in a Dream," was written by Francesco Colonna, a Dominican monk, at Treviso in 1467.[272] There is some reason to conjecture that he composed it first in Latin;[273] but when it appeared in print in 1499, it had already assumed the garb of a strange maccaronic style, blending the euphuisms of affected rhetoric with phrases culled from humanistic pedantry. The base of the language professes to be Italian; but it is an Italian Latinized in all its elements, and interlarded with scraps of Greek and Hebrew. The following description of the Dawn, with which the book opens, serve as a specimen of its peculiar dialect[274]:
Phoebo in quel hora manando, che la fronte di Matuta Leucothea candidava, fora gia dalle Oceane unde, le volubile rote sospese non dimonstrava. Ma sedulo cum gli sui volucri caballi, Pyroo primo, & Eoo al quanto apparendo, ad dipingere le lycophe quadrige della figliola di vermigliante rose, velocissimo inseguentila, non dimorava. Et coruscante gia sopra le cerulee & inquiete undule, le sue irradiante come crispulavano. Dal quale adventicio in quel puncto occidua davase la non cornuta Cynthia, solicitando gli dui caballi del vehiculo suo cum il Mulo, lo uno candido & laltro fusco, trahenti ad lultimo Horizonta discriminante gli Hemisperii pervenuta, & dalla pervia stella ari centare el di, fugata cedeva. In quel tempo quando che gli Rhiphaei monti erano placidi, ne cum tanta rigidecia piu lalgente & frigorifico Euro cum el laterale flando quassabondo el mandava gli teneri ramuli, & ad inquietare gli mobili scirpi & pontuti iunci & debili Cypiri, & advexare gli plichevoli vimini & agitare gli lenti salici, & proclinare la fragile abiete sotto gli corni di Tauro lascivianti. Quanta n el hyberno tempo spirare solea. Similmente el iactabondo Orione cessando di persequire lachrymoso, lornato humero Taurino delle sete sorore.
Whether Francesco Colonna prepared the redaction from which this paragraph is quoted, admits of doubt. A scholar, Leonardo Crasso of Verona, defrayed the cost of the edition. Manutius Aldus printed the volume and its pages were adorned with precious wood-cuts, the work of more than one anonymous master of the Lombardo-Venetian school.[275] It was dedicated to Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino.