Alberti on the Use and Abuse of Books Review
The Phenomenon of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge, Vittore Carpaccio, 1465
by Caspar Pearson
This summer has seen English cities engulfed by the worst rioting since the early 1980s. Such was their ferocity that the riots quite eclipsed the troubles of News International, Anders Breivik's horrific massacre, and the last days of Colonel Gaddafi in the British press. What began equally a sit-in following the fatal shooting by police force of a black man in north London swiftly grew into something very unlike. Looting and arson spread across the capital and so northwards to Birmingham and Manchester. TV footage showed immature men of all races fighting police for command of the streets and frequently, seeming to win. Running from one store to the next, and breaching security shutters with surprising ease, it appeared the rioters had no cause other than the aggregating of consumer goods. Sneakers and electrical equipment were among the prime targets but everything from clothing to chocolate was taken. In Birmingham, iii British Asian men were killed, run down by a car as they stood on the sidewalk protecting local businesses. In due west London, a human being died after he was attacked on the street. Boob tube pundits speculated that we would presently witness curfews and the deployment of the army.
As the footage of called-for cars and buildings looped without interruption, many asked themselves how such an result was possible. Some Londoners, who had viewed their city every bit a supreme instance of the richness and vivacity of urban life, began to think again. Who were these people with no sense of a social contract? What had produced them? Were they only criminals, bent on enriching themselves by whatever means? Were they blithe by a nihilistic rage built-in of social exclusion and disenfranchisement? Photographs of pristine bookstores, left untouched among the devastation, were employed to demonstrate the purely mercenary quality of what had occurred. Some felt they had witnessed a catastrophic failure of societal structures. The prime government minister, elected on a promise to fix "broken Britain," now declared that parts of club were not simply cleaved just "sick."
In the following days and weeks, every bit courts sat through the night and handed downward heavy sentences, the 'remedy' to England's sickness was much debated. Some commentators demanded that law should in future employ water cannon and baton rounds, tactics hitherto confined to Northern Republic of ireland. Restrictions on social networks were mooted, amid protests that such a move would cause the government to resemble the kind of dictatorships whose passing it had recently celebrated. Some argued for an finish to cuts in public spending and activeness to address inequality. Others still looked at London's topography and wondered whether its irregular patchwork of rich and poor and its juxtaposition of spacious, period residences with grim, concrete housing estates was not a recipe for disaster. On the cyberspace, at that place was speculation that some people merely could not be lived with and should be removed from the city: taken outside, offshore even.
An Orange telephone shop targeted by looters, next to a Waterstones bookshopthat was left untouched. Photograph past Roy Pinnock
Amidst all of this commentary, one national newspaper published an article suggesting that the solution might be institute in Italy. Beneath a photograph of Carpaccio's Miracle of the Cantankerous, the author observed that the Italian Renaissance provided examples of a rich array of urban experience from which much could be learned. Some cities, similar Florence, had been turbulent simply others, such as Venice – revealed in Carpaccio'south painting as an exquisite city on a homo scale – achieved a remarkable stability.
This tendency to regard the Italian Renaissance equally a model for urban development, which naturally takes a rather selective look at the historical tape, has a long pedigree. The Renaissance, it is felt, witnessed the flowering of numerous cities where beauty was paramount and where the urban and the urbane coincided; qualities that still impress themselves on holidaymakers today. Simultaneously, it is sometimes argued, the catamenia witnessed the nascency of a new body of urban theory in which the city became an object of conscious reflection. Burckhardt alleged that, in the Renaissance, the state was treated every bit a work of art and the aforementioned might be said of the metropolis (which was to some degree coextensive with the state).
The builder and scholar Leon Batista Alberti (1404-72) is a figure of groovy importance in this scheme. His architectural treatise, De re aedificatoria, was the first to exist written since the age of Augustus. It addresses the art of building in its totality and has been described as the first treatise on urbanism proper. As an architect, Alberti participated in the urban renewal of several cities, designing some of the canonical buildings of the Italian Renaissance. Described by Burckhardt as uomo universale, Alberti's own extraordinary intellectual range has sometimes seemed to exemplify the vitality of the city-states themselves.
Post-obit this tradition, there is a temptation to view Alberti primarily as a celebrator of the metropolis but this is not the case. He returns to the subject field of the urban earth time and again in his writings – not only in the architectural treatise but also in his vernacular, moral dialogues and Latin works of all kinds. In every case, the metropolis poses a problem. The fragility of the urban order, the realization of which came as such a shock to Londoners this summer, was ever at the forefront of his mind. Simply a fiddling beneath the surface, and sometimes above information technology, Alberti saw destructive forces set up to unleash their potential. For this reason, nosotros do not find him describing ideal cities or crafting panegyric to those that existed but grappling instead with the most pressing kind of urban problems; searching for ways in which cities might be improved and sometimes speculating equally to their ultimate viability.
Alberti must rank among the well-nigh educated men of his times, a skilled writer who referenced an extraordinary array of ancient sources in his works. Antique literature offered some strong affirmations of the value of urban life but besides highlighted the city's volatility and liability to destruction; a subject that is central to much epic poesy, for example. Biblical narrative also lingers on the ruination of cities, and theologians such every bit Augustine viewed the settlements that human congenital as imperceptible entities whose being was necessitated by the Autumn. These traditions conduct strongly on Alberti's thinking but his views are colored as forcefully by his own, firsthand observation of the city-states. At the root of Alberti'south preoccupations relating to cities lies an anxiety regarding homo himself, a being who is capable of cultivating the liberal arts and attaining virtù merely who is also bailiwick to unreason and immoderate desire. Man is a divided creature whose failure to achieve reconciliation with himself exposes him and his works to the vicissitudes of fortune.
Alberti would not accept shared in Londoners' surprise at the events of this summer. In one of his dialogues, a character warns confronting the belief that all men are skilful and information technology often seems that he considers the bulk of humanity to be guided past irrational impulses. Men in cities, it is asserted in several of his works, are more decumbent than others to unreason. Often, they actively despise learning – a charge also leveled past some in London who were inclined to find significance in the looters' disdain for bookshops. Alberti sometimes suggests that urban life may cause men to take on the natures and manners of ferocious, wild animals. As he sees it, this certainly applies to the lower orders, who must anyway, by necessity, be the enemies of the rich. It seems to have been Alberti's view that wealth existed in finite quantity. The poor, therefore, may only become wealthier through the impoverishment of the rich and, since the poor make upwards past far the bulk of humanity, the rich must exist in a condition of constant siege.
In view of this, information technology is unsurprising that Alberti considers how ane might accept radical, authoritarian measures to suppress the threat of the poor. The issue of class topography is given substantial attention and Alberti speculates about the claim of living alongside the lower orders, considering whether information technology is desirable for the wealthy to separate themselves from the remainder of the population and, if and so, how it might be accomplished. Even so, information technology is non merely the poor from whom one might want to seek refuge. Immoral men of all classes are to exist avoided and in one dialogue a grapheme expresses the wish that glutinous and drunken youths might be removed from the city altogether and confined to some deserted island. Ane of the main vices to infect the lower classes – the desire for innovation and change in the social order – is in fact seen by Alberti as every bit prevalent among the upper echelons. Wealthy and vainglorious citizens seek to change the constitutions of states, exult themselves, expropriate public goods, undermine institutions and erode ancient civic freedoms.
On this basis, as has been brilliantly argued by scholars including Manfredo Tafuri, Christine Smith, Joseph F. O'Connor and Stefano Borsi, Alberti engaged in a dissimulated but penetrating critique of the policies of his employer, Pope Nicholas V. A close observer of Nicholas's pontificate, and the renovatio of the urban center of Rome that went forth with it, Alberti was motivated to reflect on the nature of tyrannical government and its architectural expression. Once considered to take been the architectural encephalon behind Nicholas's program, many scholars have come to see Alberti every bit at best uneasy about the pope's schemes. Certainly, he condemns buildings that are immoderate in size or ornamentation and that serve the purpose of vanity above all else. On the other hand, he proposes, in the De re aedificatoria, a unlike form of architecture and he considers the idea that truthful architectural beauty might take a restraining influence on the violence of man.
It is the exploration of issues such as these that causes Alberti to confront questions that accept not lost their relevance: how might buildings and cities resist the destructive onslaught of time and nature? Is it possible to develop secure defenses against external enemies? How should the metropolis be governed and what should be the character of the ruler? Are state violence and compulsion legitimate or effective ways to bring about order? Is information technology possible to exert control without the appearance of tyranny? Can one alive in the city without damage to one'due south health? Is information technology better to live in the country than the city? Does the program of a city behave upon the likelihood of it falling into civil strife? What is the role of environment in determining behavior and what value should be placed on architectural beauty?
Alberti's responses to these questions are of course consistent with fifteenth rather than twentieth-century cultural and intellectual norms, and the modernistic reader will oftentimes experience out of sympathy with him. Nevertheless, his speculations highlight issues and attitudes that remain at the eye of debates on urbanism. Alberti emerges from his discussions as both an enthusiast of the city and a perceptive observer of its problematic nature. Indeed, nosotros might speculate that for Alberti, a Florentine born in exile, the notion of the urban center was inherently problematic in a way that it would not accept been for those who were born and raised inside their own patria. Italy did offer a diverse range of urban experiences, every bit the British newspaper columnist observed, and exiles had occasion to pay particularly close attention to them. In his treatise on the family unit, where members of the Alberti association are the main speakers in the dialogue, Alberti has his protagonists discuss how one might choose a city in which to alive in foreign lands. Weighing upwardly the advantages and disadvantages of each one, the nature of cities is presented to the reader every bit a complex thing that might vary profoundly from one place to the side by side.
By the fourth dimension that he wrote the Della famiglia, the Alberti family had been readmitted to Florence. Alberti himself had embarked on a successful career at the Curia in Rome and had cause to spend extensive periods of time in his homeland to the north. As a young man, he had complained that serious scholars had to forego all style of pleasures, among which 1 of the greatest was "to wander through cities and regions: to gaze upon temples, theaters, fortifications and all sorts of buildings, to walk in places which, by nature and past human labor and design, accept been made beautiful, welcoming and secure." [ane] However, across the grade of a lifetime devoted to scholarship, Alberti found occasion to visit many of the cities of Italy and to gaze upon all manner of constructions. Frequently he establish them a source of inspiration, every bit is evidenced past his fulsome praise of Florentine artists and Brunelleschi's vast cathedral dome. But if Alberti found inspiration in the metropolis-states, he too found anxiety.
Reference:
[one} Leon Battista Alberti, The Use and Abuse of Books. Translated with an introduction past Renée Neu Watkins. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1999, p. 20.
Most the Author:
Caspar Pearson is a lecturer at the Academy of Essex, specialising in the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance. He is the author of Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City.
Source: https://www.berfrois.com/2011/09/caspar-pearson-urban-siege/
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