Da Vinci's Ghost (19 page)

Alberti saw the city in the same way, as did the pope he served in the early 1450s: Nicholas V, himself a learned humanist. So when Alberti presented a first draft of his
On the Art of Building
to Nicholas during those years, the symbolism of the gesture would have been obvious. At the dawn of an imperial age, Vitruvius had written a ten-book guide to the building of empire and had given it to the man in charge of Rome—and
now Alberti was doing the same. Not for nothing did he soon come to be known as
the Florentine Vitruvius
.

Alberti began
On the Art of Building
by defining what he considered an architect to be. He didn’t mean a medieval master builder—a craftsman, that is, who, following the plans of a patron, oversaw the business of construction. He had in mind a high-level court adviser, a man of rare genius and experience. Thoroughly versed in the liberal arts, as Vitruvius had recommended, and working always with nature as his guide, Alberti’s architect designed and built the things that made civilization and empire possible: towns and cities, houses, public monuments, temples, theaters, streets, walls, sewer systems, wells, baths, bridges, aqueducts, harbors, tunnels, mills, construction devices, machines of war.
“Let it be said
,” Alberti wrote, summing up the job, “that the security, dignity, and honor of the republic depend greatly on the architect: it is he who is responsible for our delight, entertainment, and health while at leisure, and our profit and advancement while at work, and, in short, that we live in a dignified manner, free from any danger.”

On the Art of Building
came out in print for the first time in 1485, just as Leonardo and Bramante were developing their friendship, and the two no doubt spent much time discussing it. (In the early 1500s,
Leonardo would even record
owning a copy, although it’s not clear when he acquired it.) What Alberti had to say about the role of the architect must have been music to Leonardo’s ears. Here was one of the great figures of the Renaissance, a role model in so many ways, redefining the role in a way that tailored it almost exactly to Leonardo’s talents and interests. There was that annoying part about being well educated in the liberal arts, of course—but he was working on that.

But Leonardo had little interest in ancient architectural orders and different building styles. What attracted him most about
On the Art of Building
, as reflected in many of his notebook jottings, were Alberti’s grand ideas about design—among them those laid out in
On Sculpture
and
On Painting
. In those two books Alberti had tried hard to elevate the status of the artist from menial laborer to conceptual thinker. Now he was doing the same for the architect. Buildings could be not only useful and lasting but also beautiful and true, Alberti wrote. That would only be possible, however, if in everything he did the architect adhered, just like the sculptor and the painter, to certain principles of universal proportion and harmonious design—the very principles that Vitruvius had so concisely embodied in his famous man in a circle and a square.
“The harmony is such
,” Alberti explained, “that the building appears to be a single, integral, and well-composed body.”

A
LBERTI DIDN’T WRITE
On the Art of Building
for practicing architects and engineers. He wrote it primarily for Italy’s newly powerful humanistic elite: rulers such as Pope Nicholas V, in Rome, whose interest in antiquity had led him to found the Vatican Library and begin restoring the city’s ancient monuments; and Lorenzo de’ Medici, in Florence, to whom the printed edition of
On the Art of Building
was dedicated.

These were men Alberti knew personally. Their training as humanists meant they already appreciated the value of ancient learning and ideas, and their roles as powerful rulers and patrons meant that they could bring about big changes—which, when it came to architecture, was exactly what Alberti
wanted. He wrote
On the Art of Building
, in effect, as an extended rhetorical argument. The book was an attempt to persuade his friends and colleagues in high places to embark on an ambitious new building program rooted in classical ideas but executed with a modern touch, in what today we’d call the Renaissance style.

Another of the powerful friends with whom Alberti shared his ideas and his manuscript was Federico da Montefeltro, the duke of Urbino, best known today as one of Machiavelli’s models for
The Prince
. A cunning soldier and politician, Federico was also the patron of a great humanistic court who, in the middle of the century, had decided to found a library that would rival the Vatican Library in its range and magnificence. Sparing no expense, he amassed one of Europe’s most comprehensive collections of ancient and medieval manuscripts, which included, according to one late-fifteenth-century cataloger,
“works on architecture
[and] and all books treating of the machines of the ancients for conquering a country.” It was a collection that attracted all sorts of visitors—among them the young Sienese engineer Francesco di Giorgio Martini.

Francesco was a figure
of diverse talents and responsibilities. Born in 1439 as the son of a poultry farmer, early in his career he established himself as a talented painter and sculptor in Siena. But his range of interests and activities soon broadened significantly. In 1469 he signed on with the town’s waterworks department as a hydraulics engineer, and two years later he received his first architectural commission, the renovation of a local chapel. By the middle of the next decade he had attracted the attention of Duke Federico—who, at least according to Francesco, came to love him like a son. That may well have
been true. Francesco would work in the duke’s service as an architect and military engineer for most of the next fifteen years.

Francesco’s gifts were obvious from the moment he arrived in Urbino. But so was his one great deficiency: he lacked a strong background in the liberal arts. To rectify the situation, Federico encouraged him to learn what he could from the scholars of his court and to read widely from his huge collection of manuscripts. Given the run of the duke’s library, Francesco soon found his way to all those works on architecture and military engineering, among them the
Ten Books
of Vitruvius.

Like so many others in Renaissance Italy, Francesco recognized that the
Ten Books
represented a treasure trove of information about the architectural ideas and practices of classical antiquity. Lacking a formal education, however, he had a hard time making sense of the text, which had confounded even the immensely learned Alberti. All he could reasonably hope for, as a visual artist and practicing architect, was that he might learn something from its illustrations. But it didn’t have any.

A survey of architectural styles with no pictures? The idea seems bizarre today. But before the arrival of printing, words, not illustrations, were considered the most reliable way of transmitting technical knowledge and information. In the eras of the scroll and then the manuscript, scribes were able to reproduce text much more quickly and faithfully than images, which required special artistic talents to reproduce accurately and which degraded quickly when copied imperfectly generation after generation.
“Pictures are very apt
to mislead,” wrote Pliny the Elder in the first century, after detailing such problems. Some fourteen centuries later, Alberti seems to have
felt the same way:
On the Art of Building
itself contained no illustrations.

Francesco thought differently. As a member of the breed of artist-engineers that was emerging in fifteenth-century Italy, he believed, above all, in the explanatory power of images. He had copied the engineering drawings of Taccola, under whom he may have studied in Siena, and knew just how effective pictures could be in transmitting information—about, say, the various machines devised by Brunelleschi (
Figure 23
, page 115), or, for that matter, in conveying the idea of the human body as the source of all measure and design (
Plate 7
).

The problem, as Francesco understood it, was a basic one. Without images, one couldn’t convey to others the precise nature of a building or a machine, much less an analogy or a metaphor. Verbal explanations always gave rise to
“as many interpreters as readers
,” he believed, whereas images, if properly executed, nailed things down.

To make his point he began to load up his own work with illustrations.
He did so most memorably in his
Treatise on Architecture, Engineering, and the Art of War
—a work, dedicated to Federico, that he began in the mid-1470s, or perhaps even earlier, and then continued to revise as his self-education progressed and his stature as an architect grew. Employing relatively new drawing techniques, such as linear perspective and the cutaway view, he scattered pictures everywhere in the
Treatise
, showing church plans, facades, columns, cornices, cranes, mills, water pumps, machines, weapons, and more (
Figure 31
).

But Francesco wanted to do more in his
Treatise
than just describe buildings and machines. Like Alberti, he wanted to explain their inner workings (hence his use of the cutaway
view) and to demonstrate, in doing so, that architecture was an elevated intellectual discipline rooted in a fully rationalized program of thought—the central principle of which, he would later write after having studied Vitruvius, was that all harmonious design should derive from
“a well-composed
and proportioned human body.”

Figure 31.
Cutaway view of a water-powered grain mill, from Leonardo’s copy of Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s
Treatise
(c. 1481–84).

Plenty of other Renaissance architects had expressed similar thoughts, most recently Antonio di Pietro Averlino, better known as Filarete—yet another Florentine artist turned architect who had moved to Milan in search of a career in the service of the city’s duke. In 1464, in fact, Filarete had produced the only other significant treatise on architecture to appear in fifteenth-century Italy: the
Libro architettonico
, a curious work of narrative fiction, didactic in nature and heavily influenced by both Vitruvius and Alberti, that abounded with references to
the human analogy.
“I will show you
that the building is truly a living man,” Filarete wrote, echoing Alberti and anticipating both Francesco and Leonardo. “You will see what it must eat in order to live, exactly as it is with man. It sickens and dies, or sometimes is cured of its sickness by a good doctor.”

Alberti and Filarete both deployed the human analogy as a literary conceit. But Francesco decided that in his
Treatise
he would do something different: he would try to capture it
visually
, for scholars and practitioners alike. Hence the ghostly images of the human form that he insinuated into so many of his church plans (
Figures 2
and
3
, page 9) and architectural drawings (
Figures 32
and
33
).