Leon Battista Alberti has shaped our thinking about architecture. Finally his life’s work can be read in translation ★★★★☆

It is remarkable that only now a Dutch translation of About architecture by Leon Battista Alberti, written around 1450. The re aedificatoria, as the original Latin title reads, has been a benchmark for architecture and urbanism for half a millennium, as architectural historian Koen Ottenheym shows in his excellent afterword. And the Netherlands is a country of builders and city planners par excellence. About architecture describes the creation in theory and practice of an ideal living environment which, as Alberti shows in many ways, must be functional, healthy and attractive.

In the Netherlands in particular, the influence of Alberti’s ‘through-composed’ vision on building has been great. The capital Amsterdam boasts a ring of canals that was intended to be the symmetrical, functional reflection of the cosmic order, embedded in the local environment. This idea fits in seamlessly with what Alberti recommends in his fourth book: adapting the buildings to the nature of the construction site, based on necessity, practicality and use, without losing sight of enjoyment. Throughout his treatise, Alberti also compares buildings and their urban relationship to bodies, and relates that human measure to the mathematical proportions of the cosmos. Exactly the principle on which Jacob van Campen designed the building that has long been the best known of the Low Countries, indeed one of the best known in Europe: the Amsterdam city hall (now the Palace on Dam Square) from the middle of the 17th century.

But also fits in other ways About architecture in what at first sight seem typical Dutch traditions. When Alberti mentions aesthetic pleasure, he immediately adds that every pleasure should shy away from ‘excess’. This is strongly reminiscent of a completely different heyday of Dutch architecture, the geometric functionality of Rietveld and De Stijl in the 20th century. Alberti’s ornaments, his decorations, can be understood as expressions of the purely structural functions of his buildings. Columns, for example, are part of a wall for him. In general, his attitude towards ornamentation and ornamentation is spartan in a way that seems wonderfully in line with the Protestant no-nonsense of De Stijl and De Nieuwe Zakelijk.

all-rounder

Leon Battista Alberti was a bastard from a considerable Florentine family in exile. That background has undoubtedly contributed to the boundless energy and ambition that characterize him. Jacob Burckhardt in 1860 called Alberti a uomo universale, an all-rounder, and hoisted him on the shield like the archetypal Renaissance man. Indeed, in a biography from his own time (or autobiography, the authorship is uncertain), Alberti already emerges as a real cock-of-the-head. He was not only a musician, draftsman, designer and mathematician, but also a sportsman and powerhouse – for example, he could toss coins in a church so high that you could hear them bouncing off the dome.

Remarkably enough, however, only a few brilliant architectural projects have survived from his artistic production, such as the facade of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence, well known to many Dutch tourists. That production dwarfs in comparison to his enormous literary oeuvre. On closer inspection, the universal artist turns out to be above all a writer in Latin and Italian of dialogues, tracts, aphorisms and drama.

life’s work

After a very thorough humanist training in Padua, Alberti made a career at the Curia in Rome, where he worked as a Latinist. There he realized more than others the importance of the visual arts, architecture and urban planning to the program of renovation and restoration that the Papal State was carrying out. This was reflected in technical treatises on painting and sculpture, followed by what is considered his life’s work, that on architecture.

That book not only provided the impetus and blueprint for the frenetic architectural activities that the popes began to undertake partly because of this text – activities that in turn have permanently influenced the appearance and structure of Europe’s capitals. On the other hand, the book itself is also the result of an architectural feat. For when Alberti, once successful in Rome, temporarily returned to Florence, he witnessed the construction of the masterly dome on the cathedral under the direction of master architect Brunelleschi. From the symbolic expressiveness of that dome as the literal center and pinnacle of the Florentine city-state About architecture in fact a theoretical and practical explanation, because it shows how important building is as an expression of yourself, your pretensions and your ideals.

A building of words

The virtual, because verbal demonstration of what building can do in About architecture relies heavily on classical antiquity, which lay in ruins in Rome, but which rose again in Florence thanks to the efforts of artists such as Brunelleschi. But how could that be, now that there was hardly anything left of classical antiquity? In one of his dialogues, Alberti notes that the great ancient writers have in fact built a temple: after all, their texts form a virtual edifice in which culture and civilization have taken refuge. Elsewhere, he explains that the vivid descriptions from ancient literary texts can be converted back into images by the visual artists, now that the arts have entered a new heyday. Such passages show well that the analogy between the virtual world of the words and the reality of building, painting and shaping is Alberti’s real theme.

Despite the sovereign rule of Brunelleschi’s dome, Florence and Rome were chaos in Alberti’s time, as witnessed by contemporary cityscapes. It is precisely this chaos that Alberti’s rational eagle eye wants to create order in, not only on the basis of practical observation, but also and above all on the basis of classical sources. In the first place, these are the ten books on architecture by the Roman master builder Vitruvius from the time of Emperor Augustus. But just as important is the concept of stylistic balance through the interweaving and interweaving of different style registers and figures into a balanced whole from Cicero, and especially the stylistic norms from Horace’s Ars Poetica.

The right balance

Exactly as Horace advises, Alberti is all about decorum: the right balance, the core of which is that the form and the content correspond to the maximum extent. From this flows Alberti’s concept of beauty: ‘the reasoned harmony (…) between the parts and the whole in such a way that nothing can be added, taken away or changed without making the whole uglier’.

Alberti would be horrified by a lot of recent, deliberately irregular architecture (think of the Groninger Museum). But the alternating order – both in individual buildings and in their urban coordination – that has come to define the face of European capitals is a direct result of this book.

Alberti’s self-designed emblem was a winged eye surrounded by flames. If the eye of God looks over everything with a sovereign gaze, Alberti’s human eye, he would have us believe, had acquired wings and could joint strike fighter flying above the earthly worm. The self-conscious viewer measures the world and sees things in proportion thanks to his ancient intellectual education. Hence the words quid tum next to it, ‘what does it matter’. What does it matter that we are earthly and mortal! The artist’s eye can gain wings through talent and effort, and survey and order the world. We now, disenchanted with the failures of totalitarianism, take a more nuanced view on this. That’s why it’s good About architecture in an immaculate edition.