LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI
Leonardo da Vinci painter-architects. Alberti is the first of the great
dilettante-architects, a man of noble birth who first took an interest
in art and architecture in the way Count Castiglione demands it
from the educated courtier. He wrote a book on painting and one on
the art of building (in Latin), and while working in Rome as a
member of the papal civil service, work which left him plenty of
free time to travel, he studied intensively the ruins of Antiquity. It
is obvious that directly the essence of architecture was considered to
be philosophy and mathematics (the divine laws of order and pro-
portion) and archeology (the monuments of Antiquity), the theore-
tician and dilettante would assume a new significance. Roman
architecture, both system and details, must be studied and drawn
to be learnt; and the system behind the styles of Antiquity was soon
—with the help of Vitruvius, the newly rediscovered Roman
writer on architecture—found to lie in the orders, i.e. the propor-
tions belonging to the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite and
Tuscan columns and entablatures. By means of books on the orders
foreign countries were taught the rules of classical building.
But Alberti was not a dry theorist. In him the spirit of the scholar
lived in a rare and happy union with genuine imaginative and crea-
tive powers. The front of S. Francesco in Rimini (pi. l), begun
in 1446 but never completed, is the first in Europe to adapt the com-
position of the Roman triumphal arch to church architecture. So
Alberti was much more serious than Brunelleschi in reviving the
Antique. And he did not confine himself to motifs. The side of the
church, opened in seven round-headed niches with heavy piers
dividing them, has perhaps more of the gravity of Flavian Rome
than any other building of the I5th century. Now these niches hold
sarcophagi, the monuments to the humanists of Sigismondo
Malatesta's court. For the east end apparently a large dome was pro-
jected, as dominating as that of the Annunziata in Florence, and
again as a monument to the glory of Sigismondo and his Isotta.
Sigismondo was a typical Renaissance tyrant, unscrupulous and
cruel but sincerely fascinated by the new learning and the new art.
The church of S. Francesco is in fact known under the name of the
Temple of the Malatesta; and on its facade an inscription runs in
large letters with Sigismondo's name and the date—nothing else.
Again exactly the same pride is exhibited by Giovanni Rucellai,
a merchant of Florence for whom Alberti designed the second of
his church fronts. Again his name appears over-conspicuously on the
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