The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (25 page)

In front of him Saint Sigismund sits on a throne, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the emperor Sigismund who had confirmed the teenage Malatesta in his lordship of Rimini. Indeed, Saint Sigismund was a fitting patron for the German emperor and for Malatesta himself. He had been a barbarian prince whose rages were so terrible that he had ordered his own son to be strangled. He later sought forgiveness and fled to a forest hermitage; but forgiveness was no more forthcoming among the barbarians than it was among the condottieri of Italy, and he was drowned at the bottom of a well.

The lesson of the painting is found in the emblems painted behind Malatesta, placed as if on the obverse of a medal. Carved in a medallion is the Castel Sismondo, the guarantee of the condottiere’s security. Below the medallion, two mastiffs lie on the floor, apparently at peace. One, all white, faces the saint (the emperor) and represents the loyalty that all dogs should show their masters. The other, black, faces away and represents vigilance: the necessary suspicion that all princes must exercise in the maintenance of their power. Piero della Francesca’s image represented not a simple supplicant before his divine patron but a prince at the center of things, loyal but distrustful, strong and barbarous. As he gazed at the finished painting, Malatesta knew that he would always be a renegade condottiere, and he decided that the
humble church of Saint Francis would become a temple dedicated to his fame, in the manner of those of the ancient emperors.

While the chapel of Saint Sigismund was under construction, other chapels were also being built under the direction of Matteo de’ Pasti and the sculptor Agostino di Duccio. On the face of it, these chapels, with their pointed arches and narrow lancet windows, simply extended the architecture of the original church. In detail, however, they were as unlike the angelic confections of a Gothic chantry as could be imagined, for in them Piero’s painted classical architecture was applied in marble to the structure of the building. Each of the arches was supported on a pair of Corinthian pilasters and was outlined by a molding carved in the manner of a Roman triumphal arch, inscribed in tall Roman capitals with epigraphs glorifying Sigismondo Malatesta.

These new chapels were nominally dedicated to the saints, but the message of the decorations that covered them was anything but Christian. Rather, the ornament formed an encyclopedia of pagan wisdom. The sacristy—the very place where the ritual objects of the Mass were stored—was dominated by Piero’s subversive fresco of the two Sigismunds. The chapel closest to the altar was dedicated to the muses, their hair flowing, their robes diaphanous, their bodies scandalously revealed. On the other side of the altar was a shrine to the planets, named for the gods of antiquity: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jove, and Saturn, which represented stages in the journey of mortals to Platonic Wisdom. The bones of Malatesta’s forebears were all piled up in an “Ark of the Ancestors”; their chapel was watched over by the prophets and sibyls of ancient times, who had foretold the coming of Christ just as surely as Malatesta’s ancestors prefigured his own rule. The altarpiece image of Verruchio, the founder of the dynasty, was hacked away from the feet of Christ at which he knelt, lest his fame obscure that of his descendant.

Yet another chapel was dominated by the sepulcher of Isotta. Malatesta had de’ Pasti and di Duccio design for her a tomb even grander than the one he built for himself. It was placed high on the wall, supported by elephants and set against the embroidered cloak of a knight surmounted by a helmet. The tomb itself is emblazoned with the arms of the Malatesta, and two putti hold aloft a sheet of bronze inscribed with the name of the condottiere’s mistress. The chapel (and
indeed the whole church) is littered with the monogram of an
S
intertwined with an
I
—celebrating, some say, the scandalous love of the tyrant, while his legitimate wife lies elsewhere in the church, entombed in obscurity.

As the work progressed, the interior of the Gothic church was clothed in classical ornament. Corinthian columns, rich cornices, and balustrades covered the architecture with fragments of antiquity. The acanthus and the laurel spread their foliage over the plain walls, and the old chapels and shrines of the saints were given over to exotic elephants, putti riding dolphins, and venerated courtesans.

Sigismondo’s own tomb capped the whole overblown, egotistic, pagan affair. It was piled high with armor and hung with banners that displayed his bawdy motto: “I bear the horn that all may see, so big you cannot believe.” (It is said that when his body was exhumed in the eighteenth century, Malatesta’s skull was indeed disfigured by a devilish horn.) To complete the blasphemy, Malatesta placed an inscription above the door to his temple, as grandiose as if he were some deified Roman emperor.

Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the son of Pandolfo—having survived many grievous adventures in the Italic War—a bringer of victory—in thanksgiving for the deeds he performed with valour and fortitude, to God the everlasting and to the city has dedicated this temple—having in his magnanimity built it at his own expense—leaving a noble, holy monument.

I
T IS NOT
recorded whether he was present at the trial of the soul of Sigismondo Malatesta, but if he was, one of the secretaries to the papal Curia must have been squirming. Like Sigismondo Malatesta, Leone Battista Alberti was a bastard, born into a bastard family. He was the illegitimate son of a house that had been banished from Florence and had a price on their heads. His father died when he was young, his family did not honor his inheritance, and he was forced to go out into the world to make a living. Alberti chose the life of a scholar: he studied canon law in Bologna and took Holy Orders in 1428. He distinguished
himself in all manner of things. According to his autobiographical
Vita Anonyma
, he was so strong that he could throw a coin up into the air and bounce it off the high cathedral vault above him, and he could jump over a man’s head with his feet together.

Alberti read and wrote in the manner of the humanists, studying the literature of the ancients so that he might better understand them and create works in their manner. In 1424, he composed
Philodoxeus
, an allegorical love story, in a Latin so perfect that a decade later he had to add a commentary explaining that the play had
not
been produced in antiquity. He codified a grammar of the Tuscan language and composed treatises on the family, meditations on
De Commodia et Incommodes Litterarum
, and invectives against the priesthood, all in the crisp Latin of Cicero or Caesar. He also confected
Intercoenales
,
Theogenius
, and
Momus
, dark fables in the more fantastic manner of Lucian.

It was through such fables that Alberti liked to explain, if that is the word, the purpose of his studies. He told one such story in
Intercoenales
. He had dreamed a dream, he said. He had found himself standing on a mountain whose base was girded about with the River of Life. The river was full of people: some holding on to the inflated bladders of animals to stay afloat, others crowded together in sinking ships, and still others attempting to brave the waters unaided and alone. Most clung to rafts made of wooden boards, some rafts drifting by themselves, others crudely lashed together.

Alberti saw a host of beings flitting through the air above the waters and the people, and he wondered who they were. A shade appeared by his side and said:

Offer supreme honour to those you see here set apart from the multitude . . . Justly . . . are they considered divine, not only because of their divine endowments, but also because they were the first to construct the boards that you see floating in the river. Those boards, upon which they carved the name of the each of the Liberal Arts, are a great help to those that are swimming.

And then the shade pointed out another group of beings, below the gods but above the desperate castaways in the water.

Those others are also similar to the gods, but they do not entirely emerge from the waters because their winged sandals are imperfect: these are demigods, and they are most deserving of honour and veneration . . . It is their merit to have enlarged the boards by adding pieces of flotsam to them. Further, they engage in the admirable enterprise of collecting the boards from the reefs and the beaches, in order to construct new ones and to proffer these works to those who still swim in the midstream.

Render, O Mortal, honour to these. Render them the thanks that they are due for having offered excellent help with these boards to those negotiating the toilsome river of life.

“This is what I saw and heard in my sleep,” Alberti recorded, “and I seemed in a marvellous way to have somehow managed to be numbered among the winged gods.” In his dream he was one of the divine: not a rearranger, but an inventor of the boards that assisted those who swam through the River of Life. Such, at any rate, were his aspirations.

Alberti joined the papal Curia in 1432 as an
abbreviator
: his Latinity was useful in drafting the endless pronouncements, minuting the endless meetings, and writing the endless letters that issued forth from the papal court. It was in the train of the papal court that Alberti first returned to Florence, the city from which his family had been exiled; and it was in Florence that he first encountered the Renaissance not only of letters but of things. Inside the cathedral, Alberti would have had time to admire the vast dome of Filippo Brunelleschi, whose completion he was there to celebrate. So enormous was this dome that it could contain the very Pantheon of Rome. Indeed, Brunelleschi had spent time in the Eternal City contemplating, measuring, and dissecting the ruins of Roman buildings in order to understand the manner of their construction and to plan the construction of his masterpiece. Most people assumed that the Roman ruins had been built by giants, or devils, or miracles; but Brunelleschi scoffed at such old wives’ tales and set to measuring the buildings themselves. When he returned to
Florence he used what he had learned in order to surpass the buildings from which he had learned it.

So amazed was Alberti by the innovations of Filippo Brunelleschi and the other artificers of Florence that he wrote Latin treatises in their honor.
De Pictura
and
De Statua
gave literary expression to the crafts of painting and sculpture and elevated them into the realm of intellectual speculation. In the 1440s, Alberti began the long process of doing the same thing for architecture, modeling his
De Re Aedificatoria
on the only architectural treatise that had survived from antiquity: Vitruvius’s
De Architectura
. Like Vitruvius’s work,
De Re Aedificatoria
is divided into ten books, which deal with public and private buildings, engineering, and the classical orders, liberally sprinkled with the writings of other authorities. But Alberti found Vitruvius himself a dubious source.

What he handed down was in any case not refined; and his speech such that the Latins might think that he wanted to appear a Greek, while the Greeks might think that he gabbled Latin. However, his very text is evidence that he wrote neither Greek nor Latin, so that as far as we are concerned he might never have written at all, rather than write something that we cannot understand.

Alberti strove to restate what Vitruvius had written in a pure Latin, uncorrupted by Greek. His very title
De Re Aedificatoria
is a Latinization of
De Architectura
, which is, at its root, a Greek word. “What we have written is (unless I am mistaken) in proper Latin, and in comprehensible form,” he noted. But it was not only a corrupted text with which Alberti had to deal, but also a corrupted architecture. He continued:

Examples of ancient temples and theatres have survived that may teach us as much as any professor, but I see—not without sorrow—these very buildings being despoiled more each day. And anyone who happens to build nowadays draws his inspiration from inept modern nonsense
rather than proven and much commended methods. Nobody would deny that as a result of all of this a whole section of our life and learning could disappear altogether.

Alberti’s task was clear, and urgent: “I felt it the duty of any gentleman or any person of learning to save from total extinction a discipline that our prudent ancestors had valued so highly.”