The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (26 page)

De Re Aedificatoria
was an attempt to revive and preserve the architectural wisdom of the ancients, and the architectural world that Alberti described in the text was one from which “inept modern nonsense”—meaning not only the work of his contemporaries but indeed the entire architectural legacy of the Middle Ages—had been carefully excised. Alberti described cities filled with magnificent fora and porticoes and theaters—buildings that, in his time, were the moldering haunts of thieves if they stood at all. He described churches as temples, the habitation of many gods rather than the one God of the Christians; and he wrote of the wisdom of Pliny or Herodotus as if they were speaking in his own time, and not from some remote and ruined past.

De Re Aedificatoria
was the work of a theorist, rather than a practitioner; but as the composition of the book was drawing to a close, Alberti was given the opportunity to put his words into action. It is not recorded exactly how and where the humanist scholar met Sigismondo Malatesta, the tyrant of Rimini, but one of the first fruits of their meeting was a medal made by Matteo de’ Pasti. It bears the date 1450, by which time the Saint Sigismund chapel was already under construction. The face of the medal shows, as ever, the profile of Sigismondo Malatesta, but the obverse depicts a building identified as “the Famous Temple of Rimini.” The medal is small, but it is possible to distinguish the features of this Famous Temple enough to observe that it was not one of the remains of antiquity that dotted the town but a new building, dominated by a huge dome.

The Famous Temple of Rimini was, of course, none other than the church of Saint Francis, whose interior was already in the process of being embellished by the medalist and his assistants. But while Matteo de’ Pasti’s interior was a crude exercise in classical collage, as corrupted as a medieval scribe’s copy of Vitruvius, Alberti’s design for
the exterior of the church was as pure a statement of classical wisdom as the author of
De Re Aedificatoria
could make it. Alberti’s facade wrapped the old brick church in a shroud of white Istrian stone. The original arched door was still there, but the scholar’s design translated it into a triumphal arch dedicated to Sigismondo Malatesta. Alberti knew all about the ancient connection of arches to military glory.

The greatest ornament to the forum or crossroad would be to have an arch at the mouth of each road. For the arch is a gate which is continually open . . . Spoils and victory standards captured from the enemy would be deposited by the gates, standing as they did in a busy place. Hence the practice developed of decorating the arches with inscriptions, statues and histories.

The triumphal arch that Alberti designed for Malatesta was framed by a pair of columns, which, in size and in most details, were copied directly from the ruined city gate built by the emperor Augustus over the entrance to the ancient Via Flaminia connecting Rimini to Rome. To either side of the arch there were niches in which, some say, Alberti intended to place the sarcophagi of Malatesta and Isotta. Above these, the clerestory window of the old building was framed by more pilasters and crowned with the sort of canopy that is held over the sacred relics of those who have been deified.

The sides of the church were similarly translated from a naive provincial Gothic into facades of the strictest classical probity. Each side was given seven rounded arches, each destined to contain the remains of one of the humanists of the court of Sigismondo Malatesta. For the east end of the church Alberti designed a great dome, not pointed in the manner of Brunelleschi’s cupola at Florence, but rounded in the manner of the Pantheon in Rome; and the whole building was raised on a high plinth, like a Roman temple lifted up above the Forum.

Alberti’s Famous Temple of Rimini was classical in its components, but it was also, unlike the interior, classical in its totality. Each and every part was carefully proportioned to each and every other part, so that they all sang in harmony, in accordance with the mathematical
laws laid down by the Greeks. Alberti wrote: “I affirm again with Pythagoras: it is absolutely certain that nature is wholly consistent. That is how things stand. The very same numbers that cause sounds to have that
concinnitas
[harmony], pleasing to the ear, can also fill the eyes with wonder and delight.”

Because each and every part of the Famous Temple of Rimini corresponded with each and every other part, it was beautiful; and because it was beautiful, it was perfect. “Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body,” Alberti proclaimed, “so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.” And if the Famous Temple of Rimini was perfect, was not also its creator divine, and numbered among the winged gods?

While Alberti was making his design in Rimini, Matteo de’ Pasti made another medal, just for him. The face of this medal shows the proud profile of the humanist scholar, and the obverse depicts a typically gnomic emblem: the eye of knowledge, flashing with creative lightning and borne aloft by divine wings. It was surmounted by the inscription “Quid tum?”—which might be translated as, “What next?”

A
LBERTI WAS STILL
secretary to the papal court. He was called back to Rome after a large wooden model of his design was completed, and the construction of the exterior of the Famous Temple of Rimini was entrusted to Matteo de’ Pasti. A series of letters exchanged between the two men at the end of 1454 illustrates only too well what happens when theory is translated into practice. It is clear that de’ Pasti and his provincial workmen did not understand the classical language of Alberti’s design and had rashly challenged his Pythagorean systems of proportion. Alberti brushed them aside.

Greetings. Your letters were most welcome in many ways, and welcome in that my Lord has done what I wanted, that he has taken the best advice from everyone. But when you tell me that Manetto asserts that the dome should be two diameters high, then I prefer to believe those who built the Baths and the Pantheon and all those other great things
rather than him; and reason more than any person. And if he relies on opinion, I will not be surprised if he is often in the wrong.

But besides the aesthetic problems there were practical ones, physical obstacles placed in the way of the realization of his perfect design. Difficulties arose because Alberti was not building a new building but altering an old one, a building that, in his opinion, was clearly an example of “inept modern nonsense.” Alberti wrote to de’ Pasti:

As for the business of the pier in my model, remember what I said to you: that the facade should be an independent structure because I find the widths and heights of those chapels [of the existing building] disturbing . . . If you alter them [the new piers in Alberti’s design], you will make a discord in all that music. And let us consider how to cover the church with something light. Do not trust the piers to carry any weight. And that is why it seemed to us that a wooden barrel vault would be more useful.

Alberti had decided to make his new facade entirely independent from the old building for two reasons. First, he considered the old building so inelegant that he did not want his new one even to touch it. Second, he believed that the enlargement of the church—the new chapels of the muses and the planets, of Saint Sigismund and Isotta—had seriously weakened its structure, which was why he proposed that the ceiling of the nave should be made of timber rather than masonry. As a result, Alberti’s new facade bears little relationship to the Gothic church behind it. Brick walls, medieval buttresses, and lancet windows appear in his new arches pell-mell, the old and the new marking out their own separate rhythms.

There were, furthermore, previously unobserved features of the church of Saint Francis that interfered with the realization of Alberti’s design, as if the church itself was intent upon obstructing his grandiose project. There were buttresses protruding from the west front, for example, that interfered with the two niches intended for the bodies of Malatesta and Isotta. The original rectangular design for these niches
would expose these ancient buttresses, and Alberti advised de’ Pasti to make the niches round so that the buttresses would be concealed. But de’ Pasti soon realized that this solution raised its own problems. The sarcophagi would not fit into round niches and would protrude from the face of the building. In the end it was decided to abandon the niches on the west facade altogether, and to place the tombs of Malatesta and Isotta inside the church. The arrogant condottiere now lies in an obscure corner just to the right of the main door.

All along, the project was plagued by Alberti’s absence. Ever fearful of losing Malatesta’s confidence, he wrote:

If someone will come here [to Rome] I will do my best to satisfy my Lord. As for you, I beg you to consider [all this] and listen to many and let me know. Someone might say something worthwhile. Commend me, if you see him, or write to him, to my Lord to whom I would like to show my gratitude. Commend me to the magnificent Roberto and monsignor the protonotary, and to all those you think love me.

All these difficulties are of the very stuff of architecture, today as in the fifteenth century; but the construction of the Famous Temple of Rimini also encountered problems beyond Alberti’s design. Quite simply, Malatesta did not have enough money to complete the project. De’ Pasti tried to save good facing stone to economize but, even so, not enough material could be had. Rather than send to Istria or Carrara for limestone or marble to be hewn from the ground, Malatesta started to take stones from the Roman harbor of Rimini—not only a revered ruin but also the city’s prime economic asset. Indeed, one scandalized citizen wrote, “Wherever there was some noble stone that could be used for decorations or inscriptions,” Malatesta took it, “to the great detriment of the city’s ancient monuments.” He induced the abbot of San Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna, built by the very Justinian who had made Hagia Sophia, to sell him chunks of his abbey; and the abbot sent him cartloads of porphyry and serpentine, which now adorn the arch around the west door of Malatesta’s temple. The people of Ravenna were so outraged that they canceled all
the contracts they had with the condottiere and called upon Venice to defend their honor.

The demigods of Alberti’s dream had constructed rafts of learning from the flotsam they found in the River of Life, and now the Famous Temple of Rimini was being constructed by lashing together the relics of ancient buildings. The humanist had not envisaged that the construction of his classical masterpiece would be so destructive to the remains of antiquity he himself had sought to preserve.

M
ALATESTA WAS AN
increasingly desperate man, and his enemies were multiplying by the day. In 1458, the new Pope Pius II engineered an alliance against him; its forces marched on the Rimini hinterland, capturing fifty-seven villages and executing all those who did not surrender. The next year Malatesta pawned all his jewels to raise troops and went into rebellion, laying siege to several papal towns. One of his paid humanists, Valturio, defiantly compared him to the “Divine Vespasian who built and completed the temple of Concord and Peace”; but by 1461 Malatesta was confined to Rimini, while in Rome the pope convened the trial of his soul.

The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The Curia deposed Malatesta from his principality, excommunicated him from the church, and condemned him to hell. He was burned in effigy at the cathedral doors of countless Italian towns. The Venetians, who thought he might come in useful to them, eventually negotiated a pardon for Malatesta, but he was required to fast for three days and then to kneel before the papal legate in the forum at Rimini to beg forgiveness.