On Alberti and the Art of Building by Robert Tavernor

by Robert Tavernor

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) - writer, painter and sculptor, mathematician and, most famously, architectural theorist and architect - came closer than anyone to the Renaissance ideal of the 'complete man'. Recognised by his contemporaries as an extraordinary person, he helped to shape, through his writings and his practical example in the arts, the way in which the natural and artificial world was perceived and represented during the Renaissance. In this book - the first digest of Alberti's architecture to be published for twenty-five years - Robert Tavernor examines a variety of the relationship between the architect and his patrons; his writings on the visual arts and his practical example; his significance for the extension of architectural theory into practice; and his success in raising the status of architecture to an art - one that sought to be in harmony with the natural world. The various building projects with which Alberti is known to have been involved are discussed in detail and placed in approximate chronological order, as well as being described in relation to the role of the patrons and builders and given an historical context.

Hardcover

First published January 11, 1999

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 2 out of 5]

For Leon Battista Alberti, architecture comes from the deep searchings of Man striving to rise up to heaven; and how powerful a metaphor for this is his unfinished church of Sant'Andrea in Mantua, whose wonderful barrel vault emerges - perfect, precise, powerfully emotional - out of the surrounding half-completed masses of unfinished rubble! Alberti was often on horseback between Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Rome or Florence and as Tavernor confirms, there is uncertainty about what he was doing at particular times. The greatest conundrum, of course, is the town of Pienza south of Siena where he probably passed frequently and whose tiny piazza is a masterpiece, embodying perhaps everything one might need to know about architecture and space. Pienza is usually thought to have been designed by his acolyte Rossellino though the spirit of the place, the logic and the ideas evidently informing the design, and the quite remarkable similarities to Alberti's other work have always forced scholars to leave other possibilities open. We can't say Alberti designed Pienza but we can be well content with the wondrous collection of other architecture he has left for our admiration. Nearly all of it is unfinished like Sant'Andrea and the troubling question raised by this book - perhaps the unnecessary question - is whether there is any point in trying to complete it. Surely its significance lies in its very incompleteness ?
Although Tavernor may intend this as a new standard work on Alberti that honour, I think, will remain with Franco Borsi (English edition published 1977). In describing the historical background and indeed in the structure of the book, Tavernor owes a great deal to Borsi but is far more contentious when he allows himself to speculate what each building might have looked like if finished. This is done by means of a lot of jiggery-pokery with computers and questionable manipulation of evidence. The results, as in the case of the Tempio Malatestiano, are frankly disastrous.
The vault at Sant'Andrea was the supreme expression of Renaissance theories of perspective, of which Alberti was the principal creator. The building was conceived as an embodiment of this, to be experienced by the human body (the measure of all things) standing in the invisible, divine perspective system. But Tavernor presents a cutaway axonometric drawing that ignores perspective and can give no insight into Alberti's intentions. Borsi did this as well but at least his axonometric is more comprehensive and offers greater potential for analysis.
Impelled to add something to Borsi it seems, to this reviewer, that Tavernor has opened a Pandora's box of possibilities none of which can either be completely refuted nor completely confirmed such as his adventure in Urbino where, since there is no tangible evidence of a bath-house he believes Alberti intended to build there - and to which Borsi makes no reference - he goes ahead and designs one himself - on the basis of evidence which he admits is insubstantial. He might instead have given us some thoughts about the very fine columns and frieze of San Pancrazio in Florence - recently attributed to Alberti more assuredly than Borsi was able to do - but this is an opportunity he misses as, inside the church, he concentrates on what is certainly a masterpiece of Western architecture, Alberti's Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre.
A propos of this Francesco Dal Co, in "Casabella" ( September 1998) wrote an elegant essay about Alvar Aalto's imitation of it in the Workers' Club in Jyväskylä (1925). Where Aalto again and again made this journey to Italy in his head every time he designed a building and tried to emulate the Italian hill-towns he had so much admired, Alberti also worked with an architecture that in various ways would evoke another time and place - in his case Roman antiquity. In that sense Alberti's, like Aalto's, can be seen as an architecture that explores difference, by taking an idealised paradigm and emulating it in a new elaboration. Alberti's paradigm - the Rome he so carefully studied - was of course nothing more than a heap of ruins and in this we can identify a space - between the Pantheon and Sant'Andrea (or between the Colosseum and Palazzo Rucellai) - in which all architecture germinates. With due respect to Tavernor this is more useful than attempting computer-generated reconstructions. The nonfinito of Alberti's buildings which for Tavernor is a problem is in fact an opportunity he has missed, and which Dal Co opens up.
Alberti had few illusions about men and knew one can only hope to extract some fragment of beauty out of the morass of life, to the glory of God. It is as fragments of perfection never equalled anywhere else, set in an inchoate confusion all around, that we contemplate his work today. What could be more beautiful? There is no need to "finish".