Leon Battista Alberti and Love

Flirting with the Chamaleon: Alberti on LoveAuthor(s): Stefano CracoliciSource: MLN, Vol. 121, No. 1, Italian Issue (Jan., 2006), pp. 102-129Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3840724 .

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Flirting with the Chamaleon: Alberti on Love

Stefano Cracolici

"What are the possible transfers of learning when life is a collage of different tasks? How does creativity flourish on distraction? What insights arise from the experience of multiplicity and ambiguity? And at what

point does desperate improvisation become

significant achievement? These are important questions in a world in which we are all

increasingly strangers and sojourners. The

knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way, may be a better model for our times than the knight who is questing for the Grail."

-Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life (1989)

In 1964, Eugenio Garin announced the discovery of Leon Battista Alberti's Intercenales and published the four previously missing books for the first time.1 Until then, the figure of Alberti was overshadowed

by the glorious image of the "universal man" popularized by Jacob Burckhardt.2 The discovery of the new Intercenales, a series of fantastic

stories, fables, and short dialogues written by Alberti between about 1430 and 1440, has ultimately capsized that glorious image and helped paint a new portrait of Alberti as the idiosyncratic creator of "a crude

1E. Garin, "Venticinque intercenali inedite e sconosciute di Leon Battista Alberti," Belfagor 19 (1964): 337-98.

2J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1995) 90.

MLN121 (2006): 102-129 ? 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



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Stonehenge, populated by lurid and gesticulating goblins," as Anthony Grafton once graphically put it.3 A shift from a solar, industrious, jovial, and sanguine Alberti to a selenic, disruptive, saturnine, and melancholic one has now taken shape; a shift which, in its turn, has

justified among current scholars of the Italian Renaissance a transfer of interest from Alberti-the-architect to Alberti-the-humanist, a humanist, more accurately, of philosophical import.4

Like most intellectual maps, this one is not only crude in its strong binary configuration but actually fails to secure the stability of the field one would finally hope to chart;5 for in the context of Italian histo-

riography, and particularly in the histories of Italian humanism, this

contradictory image of Alberti comes to represent nothing less than a hermeneutical conundrum that reenacts and corroborates the already evocative, but now quite unavailing, analogy between Alberti and the chameleon, coined by Cristoforo Landino as early as in 1481:

I recall the style of Battista Alberto, who like a new chameleon assumes the colors of what he writes about.6

The colors of the architect and the colors of the writer seem utterly irreconcilable. On the one hand, Giorgio Vasari, the founder of art

history, considered Alberti primarily a writer who had also "given at- tention to architecture, to perspective, and to painting." On the other, Francesco De Sanctis, the founder of Italian literary history, treated Alberti primarily as an architect who, "going out of his nature," had also measured himself by his fictional writing.7 The recent shift from

3A. Grafton, "Leon Battista Alberti: The Writer as Reader," Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997) 54.

4R. Fubini and A. Menci Gallorini, "L'autobiografia di Leon Battista Alberti: Studio e edizione," Rinascimento 12 (1972): 21-78; P. Marolda, Crisi e conflitto in Leon Battista Alberti (Roma: Bonacci, 1988); E. Garin, "Studi su L. B. Alberti," Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIVal XVIII secolo (Bari: Laterza, 1975) 131-96; R. Rinaldi, "'Melancholia' albertiana dalla 'Deifira' al 'Naufragus'," Lettere italiane 38 (1985): 41-85.

5L. D'Ascia, "Tecnica dialogica e tematica politica nell'Alberti volgare," Lettere italiane 46 (1994): 201.

6C. Landino, "Proemio al Commento dantesco," in Scritti critici e teorici, ed. R. Car- dini, vol. 1 (Roma: Bulzoni, 1974) 100-64: 120, "Tornami alla mente lo stilo di Battista Alberto, el quale come nuovo camaleonta sempre quello colore piglia el quale e nella cosa della quale scrive."

7G. Vasari, Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects, trans. G. du C. de Vere, ed. D. Ekserdjian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) 415; F De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, trans. J. Redfern (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968) 419. The problem of situating Alberti in the context of a specific discipline was present already to Cristoforo Landino, see "Proemio al Commento dantesco," cit., 1: 117, "Ma dove lascio Battista Alberti o in che generazione di dotti lo ripongo? Dirai tra' fisici. Certo, affermo lui

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Alberti-the-architect to Alberti-the-humanist has not solved the problem, for it is precisely his ambivalent and idiosyncratic inflection of the humanistic enterprise that today appears so new and at the same time so irreducible to any historiographical appraisal.8

To describe this conundrum in more manageable terms, it may be useful to refer to Frank Ankersmit's provocative blueprint for

conceiving the historiographical text as a "landscape painting with

figures."9 In the landscape painting of Italian intellectual history, we

may then say, the figure of Alberti stands out as an anamorphosis, as

something distorted or out of focus. The visual angle required to see this anamorphosis in its proper proportions reveals itself utterly alien to the perspective that allegedly defines the intellectual development of Italian history.10 This would prompt us to deal with at least four

historiographical incongruities: first, that at the core of the Italian Hu-

esser nato solo per investigare e' secreti della natura. Ma quale spezie di matematica gli fu incognita? Lui geometra, lui aritmetico, lui astrologo, lui musico e nella prospettiva maraviglioso piui che uomo di molti secoli."

8E. Garin, "II pensiero di Leon Battista Alberti e la cultura del Quattrocento," Belfagor 27 (1972): 501, "Non facile, forse impossibile, un profilo organico del pensiero albertiano; destinato a converstirsi nell'analisi di un linguaggio ambiguo. Eppure chi affronti la lettura sistematica di tutte le sue opere, latine e italiane, non pu6 non uscirne turbato: tali i fermenti, le sollecitazioni, la forza, la ribellione, ma anche le sopravivenze, le eredita, i ricordi. Alcuni fra i temi piu arditi del Cinquecento, da Machiavelli a Erasmo, dall'Ariosto al Bruno, circolano gia in quelle pagine tanto vivaci e, a un tempo, tanto sfuggenti-ma vi circolano uniti a motivi di tradizione e gusto medievali" (501).

9F. Ankersmit, "Statements, Texts and Pictures," A New Philosophy of History, eds. F. Ankersmit and H. Kellner (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 212-40. Ankersmit's post- modern historiography ultimately contemplates the goal of restoring the link between picture and truth that Modernism had considered "naive and misleading," suggesting a visual model of historical writing that aims at replacing, or at least challenging, the narrative model of modernist historiography (213). For a critical appraisal of Ankersmit's visual historiography, see J. H. Zammito, "Ankersmit's Postmodernist Historiography: The Hyperbole of 'Opacity,"' History and Theory 37 (1998): 339-41, P. Zagorin, "History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now," History and Theory 38 (1999): 1-24. The idea bears conceptual and morphological resemblances to Alberti's notion of "historia/istoria," best explicated to my knowledge by A. Grafton, "Historia and Istoria: Alberti's Terminology in Context," I Tatti Studies 8 (1999): 37-68.

'0 My concept of historical anamorphosis is partially indebted to L. Bolzoni, "Anamor- fosi, allegoria, metafora: giochi di prospettiva sul testo letterario," La lotta con Proteo: Metamorfosi del testo e testualitd della critica, eds. L. Ballerini, G. Bardin and M. Ciavolella (Firenze: Cadmo, 2000): 1261-82, and M. Veglia, 'La vita lieta:' Una lettura del Decam- eron (Ravenna: Longo, 2000) 20, "Ne rampolla un procedimento critico che rammenta quello, caro agli storici dell'arte, della 'anamorfosi,' la quale, di fatto, e una sorta di 'sguardo in iscorcio' che coglie, attraverso alcuni punti speciali di osservazione, l'intera figura da studiare, e ne traccia il ritratto."

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manism, there was a humanist with strong anti-humanistic tendencies;" second, that at the center of the Italian Quattrocento, generally known as the "century without poetry," there was a poet who not only wrote sonnets in the manner of Petrarch, but who successfully created new

poetic genres with the implicit goal of subverting Petrarch's intimate

project;12 third, that within this century, where Latin was considered the language to restore, there was a linguist who not only defended the right to write in the Italian vernacular, but who also compiled the first Italian grammar;13 fourth and last, that at the heart of a culture that stoically thought of substituting love and passion with themes like virtue, fortune, and fame, there was a thinker who situated love at the center of his philosophical and anthropological preoccupations.14

In the light of more recent studies, these anamorphic aberrations have provoked a historiographical discomfort that goes far beyond the

simple disciplinary debate about where we ought to situate Alberti, whether within the province of art or within the province of literature. This historiographical discomfort has activated the anachronistic

fantasy of seeing Alberti's works in conversation with other sources of thought and pleasure, not necessarily connected to his time or his

linguistic tradition, with the final result of suggesting a virtual canon of Italian literature. Some may call this canon hidden or even subversive, but it is perhaps preferable to understand it as an outlook heuristically sketched out in some imaginary interplay between certain texts of the Italian and non-Italian literary traditions, where the achievements but also the failures of the Italian intellectual enterprise may eventually

"E. Garin, "I1 pensiero di Leon Battista Alberti e la cultura del Quattrocento," 501; G. Scianatico, "L'esperienza della follia nella letteratura umanistica: Note su Leon Battista Alberti," Lavoro critico 31-32 (1984): 173-213.

12For the highly influential-but somehow misleading-label that branded the Ital- ian Quattrocento as the "century without poetry" ("secolo senza poesia"), see B. Croce, Poesia popolare e poesia d'arte: Studi sulla poesia italiana dal Tre al Cinquecento, ed. P. Cudini (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1991 but 1932) 191-216. For an historical appraisal of Croce's controversial judgment, see E. Pasquini, "I1 'secolo senza poesia' e il crocevia di Bur- chiello," Le botteghe della poesia: Studi sul Tre-Quattrocento italiano (Bologna: II Mulino, 1991 but 1977) 25-41.

13A recent edition of Alberti's grammar can be found in L. B. Alberti, Grammatichetta e altri scritti sul volgare, ed. G. Patota (Roma: Salerno, 1996).

14For a general account of Alberti's conception of love, but from a different perspective with regard to the one adopted here, see F. Furlan, "L'idea della donna e dell'amore nella cultura tardomedievale e in Leon Battista Alberti," Intersezioni 10 (1990): 211-38, and now Studia albertiana: Lecteurs et lecteurs de L.B. Alberti (Paris: Vrin, Torino: Aragno, 2003), esp. part III, "La famille, la femme, l'amour," 235-301, and the bibliography listed there.

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float to the surface. This outlook has brought scholars of the caliber of Eugenio Garin to read Alberti's works in dialogue with those of Bruno, Francesco Tateo with those of Leopardi, Anthony Grafton with those of Nietzsche, Giovanni Malerba with those of Calvino, Roberto Cardini with those of Pirandello and even Hitchcock, to mention only the names and analogies my memory now provides.15 I am tempted to take these anachronistic imaginings as both fertile and sterile.

They are sterile when they reduce Alberti's anamorphic image to a celebration of his chameleonic versatility; they are fertile, instead, when they invite the reader to picture this versatility at the crossroads between different potentialities, on and off the beaten path of Ital- ian Humanism. A close scrutiny of these potentialities could afford new vistas from which to investigate not only what occurred in Italian intellectual history, but also how it occurred and why it occurred as it did, and not in another way.

In this essay, the chameleon with which I aim to flirt is not the emblem of the "universal man" once part of a glorious interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, but rather the critical conundrum I have described so far. Its anamorphic and anachronistic configuration is taken here as a point from which to illuminate what I understand as a lost archeology of the emotional experience-an archeology of the emotional gestures and of the emotional words lost in Alberti's amorous writings. Within the vastness, intensity and variety of his work, the theme of love, which is not at all sporadic but pervasive, represents perhaps the most distorting vector of the picture.16 This vector, however, allows us to identify a line of research that may lend Alberti's works a relatively unified functional rationale. Keeping these theoretical and methodological considerations in mind, I will now

'5See F. Tateo, "Leopardi e il Quattrocento," Leopardi e la letteratura italiana dal Duecento al Seicento (Firenze: Olschki, 1978) 209-12; A. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000) 31; L. Malerba, "Presentazione," L. B. Alberti, Apologhi ed elogi, ed. R. Contarino (Genova: Edizioni Costa & Nolan, 1984) 3; R. Cardini, "Alberti o della nascita dell'umorismo moderno," Schede umanistiche 1 (1993): 60-63 (for the analogy with Pirandello), and Mosaici: I1 'nemico' dell'Alberti (Roma: Bulzoni, 1990) 45 (for the analogy with Hitchcock).

6 See A. Grafton, "Historia and Istoria," 44, "Alberti himself-as scholars have repeat- edly argued-regularly attacked the same themes and questions in multiple works, revising his ideas as his situation changed, but remaining faithful to certain problems that preoccupied him"; L. D'Ascia, "Tecnica dialogica e tematica politica," "la ricorrenza [di strutture letterarie] (una caratteristica dell'Alberti, che tende a ricombinare pochi elementi in modo sempre diverso) tradisce il centro effettivo delle preoccupazioni dell'umanista"; L. Cesarini Martinelli, "Metafore teatrali in Leon Battista Alberti," Rinascimento 29 (1989): 3-51.

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more closely discuss Alberti's personal treatment of love in accordance with its intellectual framework, its phenomenological design, and its

philosophical significance.

Love and Philology

Within the newly discovered books of Alberti's Intercenales, four-two in book seven and two in book eleven-are specifically devoted to love: uxorial love in book seven, and sentimental love in book eleven. A

good example of their witty, mercurial, and sometimes even whimsical character is offered by the short fable of the fauns who once fell in love with the moon, a short apologue, to be more precise, which in the literary context of the collection constitutes the preface to book seven. Reduced to its core, the fine translation by David Marsh reads as follows:

Some fauns, satyrs, and lesser gods once conceived a passionate love for the moon and began to court her.... the capricious and wanton moon took remarkable pleasure in making fun of her suitors, and only occasionally showed herself, as if through a small crack, so that they could behold her.

Realizing that they were spurned and despised, her suitors ... assembled a greater number of nets for the following night, and having set up guard posts, they stationed themselves far and wide.... Yet while they were thus

carefully placed, it happened that each of the guards ... seemed to see the moon slip away in a place different from where he expected. All at once, they began to shout loudly, urging each other to stop the fugitive, even by the sword, if necessary. In every part of the forest, they wearied themselves and grew hoarse from shouting. The naiads laughed.17

17 L. B. Alberti, DinnerPieces, ed. D. Marsh (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987) 126-27. The Latin original, in its unabridged form, reads as follow: "Fauni et satyri plerique, leves dii, lunam perdite adamare et sectari occeperant. Ea re, ut paulum consisteret suique adeundi videndique copiam liberalius prestaret, obtestari non intermittebant. Luna vero, vaga et lasciva, miris modis amantes ludificasse ad vo- luptatem ducebat; modo quasi ex rimula ut se interea spectarent exhibebat. Amantes iccirco cum spretos ac despectos se intelligerent, quod per gratiam et benevolentiam singuli nequissent, communi coacto in unum consilio, vi et dolo consequi instituerunt. Perspecta igitur procul sylva, unde luna emergere inque auras sese consuesse attollere videbatur, illuc omnes convolarunt, locumque ardenti opera maxima vi omnium retium infinitate laqueorum copia circumseptum et obvallatum reddiderunt; compositisque rebus suas ad pristinas sedes ea spe rediere, ut arbitranrentur non defuturum longius quin postridie illam irretitam invenirent. Itaque diurno pro opere et labore fessi noctem ipsam obdormiere. Cum autem mane crepuscolo illuc omnes leti redissent et se falsos ac frustratos intellexissent, tamen quod machinas illas cassium insidiasque omnes integras et intactas reperirent, in futuram noctem supersedendum censuerunt. At nocte insequenti, ut lunam ipsam alacri vultu et veluti ludibunda e sylva, atque, ut ex intervallo spectantibus videbatur, mediis ex plagis sublatam ethere spatiari animad-

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Available to us only since 1964, this short apologue was in fact

already known to Ludovico Ariosto, who employed it in his third vernacular satire as an allegory for the contingencies of fortune.18 Alberti, instead, prefers to present the text as an allegory of the "things that

happen in literary studies," an allegory that transforms the charming tale into a pungent invective against those "lesser gods" who, "slightly imbued with letters, conceive the hope" of becoming "great orators

by reading every available book, as if we could acquire our style from books alone, rather than by our own intense efforts."'9 The attack is more distinctively waged against those preposterous would-be-orators who take Cicero, and only Cicero, as the supreme rhetorical model of their writings, without realizing that sometimes even "Cicero is very un-Ciceronian." The great Latin orator certainly was possessed of "a divine talent," but very few of the ancients achieved it, and yet today they are all read and praised to the skies. Hence, I think that our

contemporary writers are not to be scorned, as long as they produce something that affords some small pleasure.20

vertissent, multo maiori retium copia adacta, insequentem noctem stationibus positis, fuse ac late a prima vigilia sese regionibus disposuerunt atque edixerunt, ut suo quisque excubiarum loco omnia curiosissime circumspectans et lustrans pervigilaret. Eo enim pacto futurum opinabantur, ut possit nusquam luna effugere, quin a multitudine in- terciperetur. Dumque se ita solertes haberent, evenit quisque, ut per sylvam dissipati ac dispersi erant, ut luna certo aliunde ex loco quam fuerant suspicati delabi videretur: protinus alter alterum ut vel ferro, si aliter nequeat, fugientem remorentur summis clamoribus admonendo passim defatigabantur, raucique omnes clamitando effecti sunt. Risere Naiades," see L.B. Alberti, Intercenales, eds. F. Bacchelli and L. D'Ascia (Bologna: Pendragon, 2003) 444-46.

18See Ludovico Ariosto, Satire, ed. C. Segre (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1954), III 208-31, "Nel tempo ch'era nuovo il mondo ancora / e che inesperta era la gente prima / e non eran l'astuzie che sono ora, / a pie d'un alto monte, la cui cima / parea toccassi il cielo, un popul, quale / non so mostrar, vivea ne la val ima; / che piui volte osservando la inequale / luna, or con corna or senza, or piena or scema, / girar il cielo al corso naturale; / e credendo poter da la suprema / parte del monte giungervi, e vederla / come si accresca e come in se si prema; / chi con canestro e chi con sacco per la / montagna cominciar correr in su, / ingordi tutti a gara di volerla. / Vedendo poi non esser giunti pii / vicini a lei, cadeano a terra lassi, / bramando in van d'esser rimasi giu. / Quei ch'alti li vedean dai poggi bassi, / credendo che toccassero la luna, / dietro venian con frettolosi passi. / Questo monte e la ruota di Fortuna, / ne la cui cima il volgo ignaro pensa / ch'ogni quiete sia, ne ve n'e alcuna." On Alberti and Ariosto, see C. Segre, "Leon Battista Alberti e Ludovico Ariosto," in Esperienze ariostesche (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1966) 85-95; L. Pampaloni, "Le 'Intercenali' e il 'Furioso:' Notarella sui rapporti Alberti-Ariosto," Belfagor 29 (1974): 317-25; and G. Tocchini, "Ancora sull'Ariosto e l'Alberti: il naufragio di Ruggero," Studi italiani 10 (1998): 5-34.

'9Alberti, Dinner Pieces, cit., 127. 20Alberti, Dinner Pieces, cit. For the Latin text, see Alberti, Intercenales, cit., 450, "At

enim varia res est eloquentia, ut ipse interdum sibi Cicero perdissimilis sit. Magna itidem res est dicere apte et luculenter, maiorque atque excelsior quam ut possis, nisi divino

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The relationship between the literal and the allegorical levels of the fable underscores an interesting connection between love and litera-

ture, between the psychological dimension of love and the philological dimension of literature. Of course, Alberti is not opposed to love as

such, just as he is not an enemy of philology. He is against a certain form of love and a certain form of philology-that particular form of love qualified by an obsessive compulsive attraction to an object of

desire, be it of human or bookish nature. "Humanists in High Renaissance," says Anthony Grafton again,

summing up an argument by Kenneth Gouwens, "pursued jobs and love affairs amid classical ruins, which they explored as eagerly as the bodies of their lovers."21 The eloquent illustration Grafton proposes to bolster his statement is certainly worthy of discussion:

The Florentine scholar Niccolo Niccoli, for example, became an expert evaluator of ancient gems, filled his house with fragments of ancient art, and ate, like an ancient Roman, from dishes of crystal. His biographer, the stationer Vespasiano da Bisticci, remarked that it was a "gentilezza" (elegant experience) to watch Niccoli consume a meal. In this environment, life and collecting became subject to the same kinds of study and evaluation as antiques. The belief in the artistic supremacy of the Renaissance grew up, in short, not-or not only-in writers' studies but in the hot pursuit of "object of consumption."22

What Alberti thought of Niccoli, harshly lampooned as a pedantic and bitter scholar throughout his Intercenales, is well known.23 His

pre aliis pervoles ingenio, non dico apprehendere, sed ne proprius ad eam quidem accedere. Quod ipsum veterum quoque perpauci potuere; tamen omnes lectitantur et in delitiis habentur. Ea de re illos ego hac etate haudquaquam esse aspernendos reor, qui aliquid in medium, qualecumque illud sit, afferant, quod quota ex parte nos delectet." This anti-Ciceronian statement, so far unnoticed in the scholarly literature on the subject, anticipates by about forty years the position defended by Poliziano in his famous letter to Paolo Cortesi, see A. Poliziano, Epistolae, in Prosatori latini del Quat- trocento, ed. E. Garin (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1952): 902-04: 902, "Quid tum? non enim sum Cicero; me tamen, ut opinor, exprimo."

21A. Grafton, "The Revival of Antiquity: A Fan's Notes on Recent Work," The American Historical Review 103 (1998): 118. The short note is part of the AHR Forum on "The Persistence of the Renaissance," eds. K. Gouwens and P. Findlen, AHR 103 (1998): 50-124, including papers by the editors, and comments by WilliamJ. Bouwsma, Anthony Grafton, and Randolph Starn. Grafton's passage refers to K. Gouwens, "Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after the 'Cognitive Turn,"' AHR 103 (1998): 55-82.

22A. Grafton, "The Revival of Antiquity," 119. 23For the association of Niccoli (1364-1437) with Libripeta, or "book-seeker," char-

acter of several Intercenales ("The Writer," "Religion," "The Oracle," "The Dream," and "Fame"), see G. Ponte, "Lepidus e Libripeta," Rinascimento 12 (1972): 237-65; L. Trenti, "Libripeta misantropo," Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana 91 (1987): 39-45; and, by the

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bookish fetishism, as well as his manic affection for anything potentially labeled as antique, may be easily compared to the same fatal attraction described as love. Doctors, for instance, would not find any difficulties in defining Niccoli's love for antiquity in these terms. From their point of view, love amounts to nothing less and nothing more than a mental disorder that gravely compromises the rational faculty of judgment, a passion of the mind that compels the "patient" to obsessively long for one singular object, be it of desire or of consumption. Theoreti-

cally speaking, the actual nature of that object is not important-the beloved person is not more relevant than the beloved city, to which the nostalgic traveler yearns to return, or the beloved item that the collector strives to possess.24 What is functionally important, however, is the mental fixation on a persistent idea; a fixation that ultimately prevents the lover-as well as the nostalgic traveler or the avid collector-from perceiving and evaluating reality in a correct way.25 It is

possibly true, going back now to Grafton's comment, that Renaissance

same author, "Leon Battista Alberti e Vespasiano da Bisticci," Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana 91 (1987): 282-89. This association has been recently questioned by R. Cardini, "Onomastica albertiana," in Confini dell'umanesimo letterario: Studi in onore di Francesco Tateo, eds. M. De Nichilo, G. Distaso, A. Iurilli (Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2003), vol. 1: 219.

24See M. Savonarola, Pratica medicinae, sive de aegritudinibus (Venetiis: Andreas de Bonetis, 1486 but 1479) VI.1, 63v, where the distinction between amor hereos, or love for a person, and ilischi, or love for a generic object (from the Arabic "al-isq," which stays for "excessive love"), here exemplified as amor repatriandi, or "nostalgia," becomes explicit: "Ilischi est sollicitudo melancholica qua quis ob amorem fortem et intensum sollicitat habere rem quam nimia aviditate concupescit ... Dicitur sollecitudo quia tales facti iam melancholici ex amore inordinato sunt in continua cogitatione memo- ria et imaginatione, ita ut non dormiant neque bibant ... Tales quidem secundum plurimum sunt cupientes dominas quas inordinato amore diligunt. Dicitur secundum plurimum, quia etiam aliqui non dominas cupiunt, sed reverti ad patriam, quam summe et summe amant. Unde primam dispositionem nominaverunt haereos, secundam vero, quae est amor repatriandi, ilischi appelaverunt. Ego vero feci ilischi terminum com- munem." Despite the wide literature on the subject, the concept of amor repatriandi is here uniquely treated, see H. Roscher, "La nostalgie, maladie melancholique dans la litterature de medecine ancienne, et les poetes latins dans l'Europe de la Renaissance," Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 2 (1993): 141-44. For the medical and literary topos of amor hereos, see at least J. L. Lowes, "The Lovers Maladye of Hereos," Modern Philology 11 (1914): 1-56 (with an etymological explanation of the term ilischi, 512); M. Ciavolella, La 'malattia d'amore' dallAntichitti al Medioevo (Roma: Bulzoni, 1976); M. F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990); M. Peri, Malato d'amore: La medicina dei poeti e la poesia dei medici (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1996); and, more recently, R. Folger, Images in Mind: Lovesickness, Spanish Sentimental Fiction and Don Quijote (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, Department of Romance Languages, 2002).

25Savonarola, Pratica medicinae, cit., 63v.

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humanists explored antiquities "as eagerly as the bodies of their lovers," but this passionate exploration is precisely what Alberti here aims to criticize. Acting like a Roman is utterly different from conversing with him, and "cult" is quite dissimilar from that exquisite "cultiva- tion" we may achieve through a critical commerce with the classics. If Cicero "were living in our age," Alberti significantly maintains, "he would undoubtedly forget how to speak," and he would probably also lose that particular tactus intimus, or "internal contact," which allows a person to perceive the Self as belonging to himself and therefore to appreciate "other's writings" through a personal critical perspective.26 What love dangerously compromises, Alberti seems to imply, is ultimately the faculty of criticism and the faculty of judgment, a

faculty, as Ariosto later implicitly acknowledged, that allows a person to exist and act within the contingencies of fortune.

It has been rightly said that "the Renaissance discourse on love manifests a tension between a therapeutic impulse to control the dis-

ruptive effects of passion, on the one hand, and a desire to assimilate the dynamics of erotic attraction to the experience of the literary and artistic object, on the other."27 We could also agree, along the same lines, that the new spirit of learning that emerged in Italy during the

early Fifteenth Century was achieved at the cost of love and more

importantly to the detriment of the ennobling culture of love that

emerged during the Italian Middle Ages. But if the purpose of this new

spirit of learning is to achieve the ability to determine for ourselves the value, the meaning, and ultimately the goal of our own life in an immanent and not in a transcendent way, how can we accept, Alberti seems to wonder, that this cultural renovation is to be accomplished through a shift from one object of desire to another? Especially if we

acknowledge that all objects of desire are, medically speaking, products of an overheated imagination, the result of a deteriorated mind that has lost the ability to distinguish reality and fantasy? How is it possible to endorse a "vita nuova" which might transcend the carnality of human passion by imagining a journey from this world to the other world in a mystical encounter with the divine? Or moving from passion for a single woman, expressed and sublimated in the vernacular, to a

passion for the antiquity expressed and perfected in Latin?

26For a recent discussion of tactus intimus (Cic., Ac., 11.24), see R. Bodei, Destini per- sonali: L'eta della colonizzazione delle coscienze (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2002) 284-86.

27This was the description of a session organized by Stephen Campbell at the 2004 RSA Conference in New York City.

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For Alberti, the answer to these questions is not to be found in medical theory, but rather in literary theory, and more precisely in that theory of love sustained and developed in the literary praxis of

elegy. In his Amator, a short piece of prose that allegedly, but somewhat

improbably, constitutes the Latin translation of his brother's Efebia, written in the Italian vernacular around 1429-30, Alberti claims to have studied in depth and absorbed the Roman elegiac tradition.28 Clear and direct quotations from Propertius, Catullus, and Ovid are

easily found throughout his writings.29 He imitates Catullus in his

Passer, now regrettably lost, and Propertius in one of his vernacular sonnets.30 Propertius, in particular, could have offered him the existential model for a "story," where the protagonist moves from love to

antiquarianism, from the love for Cynthia to the love for Rome, as

expressed in book four of his poetic collection.31 But he also must have been struck by the ambiguous criticism that Ovid implicitly leveled

against Propertius, challenging from within the existential symmetry between theme, genre, and life that his work so coherently embodied. Ovid literally anatomized the theme of love in a diffraction of different genres, gestures, and discourses (from his Amores and Heroides to his Ars Amandi and Remedia amoris) with the critical result of chal-

lenging, if not subverting, Propertius' elegiac connection between life and poetry.32 Interestingly, Ovid's Remedia amoris soon made their

28L. B. Alberti, "Amator," Opera inedita et pauca separatim impressa, ed. G. Mancini (Florentiae: Sansoni, 1890) 3.

29According to Guglielmo Gorni, in L. B. Alberti, Rime e versioni poetiche, ed. G. Gorni (Milano and Napoli: Ricciardi, 1975) 16, "nelle opere in prosa dell'Alberti citazioni sicure da Properzio si ritrovano, se ho visto bene, solo a partire dai primi due libri Profugiorum ab aerumna, coevi o posteriori al Certame coronario [1441]." But, in fact, the presence of Propertius is evident already in his early writings, as documented by G. Ponte, Leon Battista Alberti, umanista e scrittore (Genova: Tilgher, 1981) 157, n. 35.

30For Catullus and Alberti, seeJ. H. Gaisser, Catullus and his Renaissance Readers (Ox- ford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 215-16.

31 For the early discovery and imitation of Propertius's elegies in the Italian humanism, see N. Tonelli, "Petrarca, Properzio e la struttura del canzoniere," Rinascimento 38 (1998): 249-315; M. Santoro, "Properzio e la poesia volgare nel Quattrocento," Properzio nella letteratura italiana: Atti del convegno nazionale (Assisi, 15-17 novembre 1985), ed. S. Pasquazi (Roma: Bulzoni, 1987) 71-92; D. Coppini, "Properzio nella poesia d'amore degli umanisti," Colloquium Propertianum secundum (Assisi, 9-11 novembre 1979), eds. F. Santucci and S. Vivona (Assisi: Accademia Properziana del Subasio) 169-201; by the same author, "I commento a Properzio di Domizio Calderini," Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 9 (1979): 1119-73; and A. La Penna, L'integrazione difficile: Un profilo di Properzio (Torino: Einaudi, 1977) 250-99.

32See M. Labate, "MeTx3aot; 'iS; ,akXo y7vo;-: La poetique de l'elegie et la carriere poetique d'Ovide," Elegie et epopee dans la poesie ovidienne, Heroides et Amours: en hommage t Simone Viarre, eds. J. Fabre-Serris and A. Deremetz (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Universite

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appearance in the cures against love that doctors suggested in their

chapters on lovesickness.33 But if doctors' therapeutic reading of Ovid was essentially grounded in content, what Alberti seems instead to have learned from him was the cognitive benefit of a diversified treatment of love, discovering-as Cavalcanti and Boccaccio had done before-the

physiological and ethological potential of amorous literature. This cognitive acknowledgment leads Alberti to endorse, and en-

deavor to perfect, that literary enterprise Boccaccio had purportedly abandoned after his encounter with Petrarch.34 What Alberti takes from Boccaccio, and was eventually able to verify in Ovid, amounts

precisely to the gnoseological power of love literature, where the different amorous genres, employed by major and minor authors, are not

simply to be organized within a formal taxonomy, but rather studied from a cognitive and functional point of view, in order to understand how emotions work and to find some practical strategies to control them. The acknowledgment of the cognitive and functional values of literature solicits in Alberti the exploration of a new system of

literary genres, which entails, in a more or less dissimulated polemic with Petrarch, a critical reevaluation of the highly variegated literary enterprise Boccaccio had undertaken in Naples and pursued in Flor- ence, using Italian vernacular prose as no one before him had done.35 Within the history of Italian amorous literature, Alberti is commonly considered the author of the first vernacular elegy, the first vernacular eclogue, the first vernacular love dialogue.36 All these new literary

Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3, 1999) 138, "L'elegie ne sera plus avec Ovide la forme litt6raire d'une experience humaine totalitaire qui envahit, tarit et vajusqu'a creer a son image les possibilites expressives du pote . . . Le poete elegiaque n'est plus 'poete d'un seul genre', mais devient 'poete de plusieurs genres': pas seulement au niveau potentiel (c'est-a-dire dans sa facon de percevoir son role), mais egalement au niveau historique (c'est-a-dire avec une succession d'oeuvres que l'elegie elle-meme peut annoncer et sur

lesquelles elle peut donner des indications concretes)." 33See, for all, Savonarola, Pratica medicinae, cit., 63v, "et iuvabit legere Ovidium de

remedio amoris." For a related discussion and other sources, see Roscher 144-45. 34For an account of this thorny issue, see M. Veglia, "Sul nodo culturale del Corbac-

cio," Studi e problemi di critica testuale 52 (1996) 79-100, now further developed in Veglia 2000, 47-56.

35For Boccaccio as initiator of a new system of love genres, see P. Orvieto, "Boccaccio mediatore di generi letterari o dell'allegoria d'amore," Interpres 2 (1979): 7-104.

36For Alberti's Mirzia and Agilitta (elegies), see G. Gorni, "Atto di nascita d'un genere letterario: L'autografo dell'elegia 'Mirzia,'" Studi difilologia italiana 30 (1972): 251-73; for his Tyrsis and Corymbus (eclogues), C. Grayson, "Alberti and the Vernacular Eclogue in the Quattrocento," Italian Studies 11 (1956): 16-29; for his Deifira (love dialogue), S. Cracolici, "I percorsi divergenti del dialogo d'amore: la 'Deifira' di L.B. Alberti e i

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genres, complemented by a highly idiosyncratic application of some older ones, are usually viewed as the experiments of a humanist who intended to revitalize some ancient genres. I prefer, instead, to see these experiments as part of an organic intellectual engagement with the mechanisms of human love on its own terms, and not as the first

stage towards a spiritual or even mystical experience. Earthly love is the subject of Alberti's writings, not divine love.

Certainly, his reflection on love is to some extent bound up with the stoic advocacy of detachment and freedom from disturbance-an ethical engagement that also courses through his writings on art and architecture as a necessary condition for good civic behavior. However, this ethical engagement is challenged at the same time by an equivalent and thus paradoxical commitment to the emotional life. This ambivalent approach occasions anxiety for both the defender of detachment and the defender of the emotions, a formal and conceptual anxiety that the reader should profitably keep in mind in approaching Alberti's love writings. This anxiety is certainly not an "anxiety of influence," as the tale of the fauns and the moon would utterly exclude. Nor is it a form of philological anxiety, for we know now quite well, after the studies of Cardini, Grafton, and Tanturli, how self-consciously innovative Alberti was as a writer, and how emancipated from any kind of

philological restrictions he was as a reader.37 His intellectual anxiety was rather steered towards an empirical clarification of his personal concerns. We could call it an "experimental anxiety," specifically oriented towards a definition of a particular problem framed in a

particular situation, be it concrete or hypothetical in nature. What Alberti intends to present in his writings is not a "philology of love,"

suoi 'doppi,"' Albertiana 2 (1999): 137-67. Serena Fornasiero has recently discovered that the first Italian vernacular eclogue was actually written well before Alberti by a rather obscure poet active during the fourteenth Century, see F. Arzocchi, Egloghe, ed. S. Fornasiero (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1995). For Alberti's poetry in general, see G. Gorni, "Nuove rime di Leon Battista Alberti," Studi difilologia italiana 30 (1972): 225-50; D. De Robertis, "Ut pictura poesis (uno spiraglio sul modo figurativo albertiano)," Interpres 1 (1978): 27-42; S. Niccoli, "Le 'Rime' albertiane nella prospettiva poetica quattrocentesca," Interpres 3 (1980): 7-28; E. Pasquini, "Gli esperimenti di Leon Battista Alberti," Le botteghe della poesia: Studi sul Tre-Quattrocento italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991) 245-329; G. Tanturli, "Nota alle Rime dell'Alberti," Metrica2 (1981): 103-21.

37A. Grafton, "Historia and Istoria," cit., 45, "Alberti was a self-consciously innovative writer. He regularly appropriated passages from ancient texts, deliberately assigning to them a meaning that their author had not had in mind, as he cited them." See also R. Cardini, Mosaici cit., and G. Tanturli, "La cultura fiorentina volgare del Quattrocento davanti ai nuovi testi greci," Medioevo e Rinascimento 2 (1988): 217-43.

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similar to the one Mario Equicola would write sometime later, in his Libro de natura de amore, a love encyclopedia filled with quotations and paraphrases from ancient, medieval, and modern sources, but a

"physiology of love": a physiology of love where the various aspects of passion are analyzed through different perspectives, evaluated in different contexts, and embodied by an impressive set of different

characters-Agilitta, Mirzia, Sofrona, Deifira, Durimna, Ecatonfilea,

Friginnio, Filarco, Pallimacro, and others.38

Love and Physiology

The alleged purpose of this intellectual engagement with love is clearly stated in Alberti's autobiography, where the connection between love and letters becomes more evident. He wrote many small works for his own satisfaction: Ephebia, De Religione, Deiphira, and others in the same free style of rhetoric; and in verse, the Elegies and Eclogues, as well as

Songs, works pertaining to love, by means of which he might help students to acquire good principles of conduct and to attain tranquility of mind.39 How does this stoic program work? What should "students" do in order "to attain tranquility of mind?" Should they avoid love all together or should they rather learn how to love well? How are

they finally supposed to arrive at this kind of knowledge through the

reading of elegies and eclogues? Before answering these questions, it is first necessary to take a closer look at the particular epistemological framework to which Alberti's writings on love ultimately refer.

The first attempt to seriously take into account Alberti's love writings is contained in the eleventh chapter of De Sanctis' History of Italian Literature. This chapter, quite short in comparison to those focused on Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, revolves around the figure of Poliziano and bears the title "Stanze," taken from his most famous

piece of writing. The account of Alberti's love writings appears here

38See L. D'Ascia "Tecnica dialogica e tematica politica," cit., 205, "Alberti non si accontenta di esemplificare nei personaggi diversi atteggiamenti psicologici, ma vuole abbozzare razionalmente una tipologia di 'furori' o affezioni emotive e irrazionali dell'animo e misurare precisamente la forza rispettiva, soffermandosi sull'amor paterno (Adovardo) e l'amore sensuale (Leon Battista)."

39See R. Watkins, "L. B. Alberti in the Mirror: An Interpretation of the 'Vita' with a New Translation," Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): 8; see the Latin text in Fubini, Menci Gallorini, 70: "Scripsitque per ea tempora animi gratia complurima opuscula: Ephebiam, De religione, Deiphiram et pleraque huiusmodi soluta oratione; tum et versu elegias eglogasque atque cantiones et eiuscemodi amatoria, quibus plane studiosis ad bonos mores inbuendos et ad quietem animi prodesset."

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in the form of a digression, loosely connected to the main idea that

fifteenth-century Italian literature, before Poliziano, was a literature without vernacular, without poetry, and consequently without love. Within this context, Alberti's love writings are described as something out of their time, evoking in De Sanctis' mind the anachronistic sce- nario of a nineteenth-century French novel:

The story of the love and jealousy of Ecatomfila reads like a lovely fragment of a lost physiological romance. It is far ahead of Boccaccio's Fiammetta in truth and subtlety of observation, though the imitation of Boccaccio is very noticeable in it, as also in the Deifira and the Epistola di un fervente amante. Here we get the tears and the quarrels of lovers, and our good Battista, going out of his nature, like Boccaccio, falls into rhetoric. To know Battista as a great writer we must seize him at the moments when he is painting or describing.40

The venturous and anachronistic association with the genre of physiology, codified in France by Brillat-Savarins' Physiologie du gout (1825) and Balzac's Physiologie du marriage (1828), is historicallyjustified with recourse to Boccaccio's Fiammetta. But De Sanctis' account seems lit-

erally haunted by this instinctual and allegedly unorthodox analogy between Boccaccio's and Alberti's amorous works, on the one hand, and the French physiological novel, on the other. And yet, it is precisely with this allegedly unorthodox analogy that the Italian literary historian hits the nail on the head. His anachronistic impression acts here as a heuristic clue, a stepping stone, which effectively postulates physiology as a potential epistemological framework via which to approach Alberti's love writings in a new way.41

40Francesco De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, translated by Joan Redfern, vol. I, 419 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1959). Here the passage in its original version: "La storia dell'amore e della gelosia di Ecatonfilea sembra un bel frammento di un romanzo fisiologico perduto, e per finezza e verita di osservazione e molto innanzi alla Fiammetta del Boccaccio, la cui imitazione e visibile nella Ecatomfilea, e piu nella Deifira e nella Epistola di unfervente amante: pianti e querele amatorie, dove il buon Battista, uscendo della sua natura, come il Boccaccio, da nella rettorica. Per trovare il grande scrittore devi cogliere Battista quando pinge o descrive." See F De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. N. Gallo (Torino: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1996, but 1870-71) 375.

41In his commentary on the quoted passage, Niccolo Gallo explains the term "fisiologico" in the sense of an "analisi naturalistica di tipo francese," with an explicit, but generic, reference to Balzac's Physiologie du mariage (see 1101). A more cogent definition of physiology, also for the urban implications that perfectly fit to Alberti's civic engagement, is found in O. Uzanne, La Nouvelle Bibliopolis: Voyage d'un novateur au pays des neo-icono-bibliomanes (Paris: H. Floury, 1897) 63-64 (the chapter bears the revealing title of "Physiologie du lecteur"), "L'art de la Physiologie ... est un art leger, subtil, ironique et degage, qu'on peut a peine fixer et qui montre toute la mobilite,

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To validate this anachronistic impression in historical terms, it is indeed sufficient to return to Boccaccio-not, however, to his Fiam- metta or to his other love writings, but to his Genealogie deorum gentilium, where Boccaccio cautiously rectifies Petrarch's famous definition of

poetry as theology:

No more is there any harm in speaking of the old poets as theologians. Of course, if any one were to call them sacred, the veriest fool would detect the falsehood. On the other hand there are times, as in this book, when the theology of the Ancients will be seen to exhibit what is right and honorable, though in most such cases it should be considered rather

physiology or ethology than theology, according as the myths embody the truth concerning physical nature or human.42

Suffice it here to add what Alberti says in the eleventh book of his

Intercenales, a book, this time, devoted to sentimental love:

Either custom or nature has implanted in our common feelings, and en-

grained in our human souls, an impulse to love those who love us, and to consider it base not to requite their love.43

Physiology, as the science of the common functions and phenomena of living things, combined with ethology, which deals with the actions

toute la charge legere et sans outrance des etres qu'il s'applique a d6crire. En litterature, la Physiologie est an article de Paris; la province n'y peut pretendre." See also F. Nies, Genres mineurs: Texte zur Theorie und Geschichte nichtkanonischer Literatur (vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart) (Mfinchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1978) 111-12.

42C. G. Osgood, Boccaccio On Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1930) 122-23. For the Latin original, see G. Boccaccio, "Genealogie deorum gentilium," ed. V. Zaccaria, Tutte le opere del Boccaccio, ed. V. Branca, vol. VII-VIII, tome 2 (Milano: Mondadori, 1998) 1548, "Equo modo, si quis poetas dicat theologos, nulli facit iniuriam. Si sacros quis illos dicunt, quis ades demens est quin videat quoniam mentiretur? Esto non unquam, ut in precedentibus patet, circa honesta eorum theologia versetur, que sepissime potius physiologia aut ethologia quam theologia dicenda est, dum eorum fabule naturalia contegunt aut mores." For a comparison between Petrarch's and Boccaccio's theories of poetry, with a thoughtful comment on the passage in question, see V. Zaccaria, "La difesa della poesia: dal Petrarca alle 'Genealogie' del Boccaccio," Lectura Petrarce 19 (1999): 228, "La poesia, piuttosto che theologia, dovrebbe essere detta physiologia o ethologia. Non Dio e oggetto della poesia, ma 'magnalia naturae atque hominis'; cioe le grandi opere della natura e dell'uomo, che l'accesa fantasia umana, reale assoluta, divinizza e colloca in un Olimpo ben diverso dai cieli della teologia sacra, che rimane infine l'unica teologia. Audace approfondimento del testo del B[occaccio], piu alto e libero di quello del P[etrarca]."

43The English text stems from L. B. Alberti, Dinner Pieces, ed. D. Marsh (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987) 199; the Latin one reads as follow: "Est et hoc seu more, seu natura in communibus sensibus ipsisque positum in mentibus et hominum animis infixum atque institutum, ut aut nequeamus aut nefas esse ducamus non eos, qui nos ament, redamare," see Alberti, Intercenales, cit., 730.

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and habits of animals within their own environment, may indeed offer both the speculative and the literary frameworks to situate and read Alberti's writings on love-all his writings on love, in verse and prose, in Latin as well as in the Italian vernacular.

One last theoretical specification. This physiological and ethological inflection of Boccaccio's definition of poetry confirms Alberti's understanding of love as a natural process, characterized by a specific social and intellectual component and particularly tailored to those who dwell in a city and deal with letters.44 It is now possible to further

specify the polemical implications of Alberti's literary project with regard to the one purported and exemplified by Petrarch. Literature, and poetry in particular, certainly falls within the province of ethics and moral perfectionism. But if for Petrarch the ethical goal of poetry pertains to the so called ethica docens or ethica absoluta, which concerns the events of the human being in general, where the boundaries between philosophy and theology are practically only a matter of captious distinction, for Alberti, the realm of poetry falls instead under the category of the so called ethica utens or ethica relativa, which concerns the events of the human being in particular and where physiology, with its cultural and social ramifications, ultimately converges with

politics.45 The moral and intellectual perfectionism Alberti has in mind suggests not just an elitist theory of the moral life, good for the intimate improvement of the state of one's soul (as for Petrarch), but

something like a shared dimension of empirical values. If not already democratic, this is a means by which the Self experiences a form of harmonic connectedness with the society and the world in general (as for Boccaccio).

In Alberti's writings, this physiological and ethological approach to love elicits a multifaceted casuistic, which variously contemplates amicable love, fraternal love, paternal love, uxorial love, and finally sentimental love, the form which interests us more specifically. For the sake of argument, I limit myself only to four phenomenological

44 M. Regoliosi, "Gerarchie culturali e sociali nel De commodis litterarum atque incommodis di Leon Battista Alberti," Sapere e/ potere: Discipline, dispute eprofessioni nell'universita medi- evale e moderna: II caso bolognese a confronto, eds. L. Avellini, A. Battistini, A. Cristiani and A. De Benedictus, vol. 1 (Bologna: Istituto per la storia di Bologna, 1990) 151-70.

45 The discussion on ethica docens and ethica utens is to be found in E. Colonna (Aegid- ius Romanus), De regimine principum libri III, recogniti et una cum vita auctoris in lucem editi per Hieronymum Samaritanium (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1967 [reprint of the 1607 Rome edition apud B. Zannettum]) 3, see also G. Wieland, Ethica, scientia practica: Die Anfdnge der philosophischen Ethik im 13. Jahrhundert (Munster: Aschendorff, 1981) 103.

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stages of sentimental love: love as flirting, love as struggle, love as

simulation, and finally love as collaboration. This phenomenology derives primarily from an in-depth reflection on the epistemological potentialities of elegy-sentimental love ultimately translates elegiac love into literary terms.46 Elegy for Alberti stands physiologically for the genre of suspicion, the genre in which the intimate dialogue between voices for love and voices against love is dramatically staged as a disruptive dilemma. When these voices are given the bodies of two distinct characters, as in his Deifira, we are in the presence of the first love dialogue ever composed in the Italian vernacular literature. The defender of detachment takes the name of Filarco;47 the defender of engagement takes the elegiac name of Pallimacro, from the Latin

pallidus ("pale") and macer ("skinny"). Time and again, the mutual relations between love and friendship, men and women, reason and emotion are systematically staged from the perspective of two different

discourses, leaving the dialogue ambiguously open-ended.

Love as Flirting

In Alberti's Deifira, Filarco describes love as a physiological process that leads from the cordial moment of flirtation to a ravaging state of anger:

It has always seemed to me that love is like milk, which is most pleasing when fresh, but if left standing, picks up too many impurities. And so, in love, when lovers concentrate on offering acceptance and pleasant glances to one another, then they live happily, full of amusement, games and festive conversations. But when love stagnates, immediately suspicions crop up, and from suspicions jealousy, and from jealousy grows disdain, and from

46 For an account of the rediscovery of elegy in the Italian Quattrocento, see P. Vecchi Galli, "Percorsi dell'elegia quattrocentesca in volgare," eds. A. Comboni and A. Di Ricco (Trento: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche, 2003) 38-79; D. Canfora, "L'elegia di Niccolo Volpe ad Alberto Enoch Zancari," Rinascimento 39 (1999): 129-55. His theoretical engagement with elegy is best analyzed in L. Surdich, "'Ragione' e 'volonta': Giovanni Boccaccio e la linea dell'elegia," Studi difilologia e letteratura offerti a Franco Croce (Roma: Bulzoni) 33-63, where the cognitive dimension of this engagement is illustrated as a form of emotional knowledge placed at the intersection between the two anthropological instances of reason and will.

47For the ethymology of Filarco, see N. Perotti, Cornu copiae, seu, Linguae latinae commentarii, eds. M. Furno andJ.-L. Charlet (Sassoferrato: Istituto internazionale de studi piceni, 1989-1998) col. 419.59, 387, "Philarchus = amator imperii, ambitiosus." The definition is taken from Plato (Republic, VIII, 549a), see R. Rinaldi, 'Melancholia christiana:' Studi sullefonti di Leon Battista Alberti (Firenze: Olschki, 2002) 37.

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this come revenge and enmity. And the enmity of lovers proves to be the bitterest of all.48

The first stage of love is represented by the happy moment of flirtation. We could say that Alberti's commitment to love can be described as a sort of utopian attempt to protract this merry and joyous moment, so as to transform love into a kind of perpetual flirtation. The subsequent stage of love corresponds to a feeling of disappointment. Suspicion, jealousy, disdain and finally revenge replace reciprocal acceptance, amusement, game, and festivity. In this time of uncertainty and suspicion, says Filarco, flirtation rapidly degenerates into anger.49

Let us first ponder this idea of flirting. Flirting, we could say, represents a dynamic form of love without suspicion or obsession. If we suspect that the other is holding back or giving only in part and with hesitation, all flirtation ceases. The one obsessed by desire for the other and oppressed by his or her mental image inevitably lacks the necessary flexibility to find pleasure and pleasantness in this open and mutual interaction. Flirting, as I suggest to consider it here, can be understood as a form of language game ("un festoso ragionamento") that abolishes, or at least challenges, any sort of differences between the interlocutors, a game in which the players accept playing without assuming fixed roles and by establishing their rules, as things proceed. As soon as they place themselves in a position of either aggression or defense, the game stops, and flirtation turns into seduction, which can be defined as the willingness to conquer the other, a desire to possess him or her. Ideally, flirtation becomes only possible in a mode

48The Italian text is found in L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, vol. III (Bari: Laterza, 1973) 236-37, "E certo sempre mi parse vero che l'amore sia fatto come il latte, quale tanto piace quanto egli e ben fresco; poi soprastando piglia troppi vizi. Cosi in amare, quanto gli amanti studiano porgersi accetti e benveduti, tanto lieti vivono, pieni di sollazzo, giuoco e festivi ragionamenti. Poi fermato l'amore, subito vi surgono sospetti, e dai sospetti le gelosie, e dalle gelosie nascono sdegni, e di qui crescono il vendicarsi e le inimicizie. E solo le inimicizie degli amanti si pruovano essere acerbissime" (the English translation is mine).

49The treatment of anger in Alberti's writings presents a problem that still need to be adequately explored. This problem has begun to be addressed by L. Boschetto, "Democrito e la fisiologia della follia: La parodia della filosofia e della medicina nel 'Momus' di Leon Battista Alberti," Rinascimento 2a ser. 35 (1995): 3-29, and Rinaldi, 179-88, although the melancholic label, "ideale blasone, capace di raccogliere e con- densare l'articolata complessita di questi lati oscuri [dell'Alberti]" (5-6), is not always very convincing. Instead of structuring the analysis of Alberti's notion of anger within the framework of the studies on Renaissance melancholy, it would be more profitable to consider the "physiological" point of view offered by the genre of the invective, in its various forms and manifestations; see Paolo Orvieto's introduction to A. Poliziano, Sylva in scabiem, ed. P. Orvieto (Roma: Salerno, 1989) 1-64.

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of parity, only if there is equality and freedom between the subjects engaged in the interaction.50 In the reality of human relationships, however, this most volatile moment is doomed to vanish: flirtation is

inevitably marked by fleetingness. Only a hint of doubt that someone else may have entered the game against our consent can disturb the interaction and change it completely.

Alberti rarely quotes his sources-especially when his sources are of medieval and not of classical origin. He may quote with nonchalance rarities like Homer or Eschilus [Aeschylus, I think], but he systematically avoids quoting scholastic authors, like Thomas Aquinas, for instance. And yet, when he compares love and anger in his Amator and when he speculates in the same work with regard to terms like benevolentia and concupiscentia, he in fact alludes to the issues presented in the "Questio 28" of Summa theologiae 1-2, in which Aquinas analyzes the effects of love from a philosophical point of view. What is of particular interest, however, is that Alberti uses these two kinds of love as two different stages of the same process. In the Summa theologiae, Aquinas places benevolentia and concupiscentia in a clear opposition to each other-one being the form of love for praise, the other being the form of love for blame. Alberti, instead, points to a link between the two concepts, and stages their discussion as a dynamic transformation or actually degeneration from benevolentia to concupiscentia. It is because of the human inability to live within contingency, Alberti seems to say, that benevolentia naturally degenerates into concupiscientia; it is thanks to a myriad of minor mistakes of perception-a small, unaccountable

gesture, a "yes" which is a little too reassuring, a "no" which sounds too definite-that flirting degenerates into passion. Eventually it is because of suspicion that love degenerates into hatred.

Love as Anger

Like the moon in the tale of the fauns, the beloved, Deifira, appears as licentious, capricious, restive, skittish, and unreliable-this, of course, from the perspective of Filarco. Her name poses an interesting etymological puzzle that I suggest solving this way. A compound, as it is, of the Greek prefix 681i, meaning "battle" or "that which pertains to battle," and q(ppco, "to mix, to blend," in a clear opposition to the

50G. Simmel, "Die Koketterie," Philosophishe Kultur, 2 ed. (Leipzig: Kroner Verlag, 1912) 95-115.

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Homeric name A'ip(popoq ("the one who runs away from the battle"), Deifira may stand for "the one who gets herself mixed up in battle" or simply "woman warrior."51 Filarco describes her as "donna gareggiosa," and "garreggiare," in Alberti's terminology, literally signifies "to discuss, to argue, to answer in a sharp manner." In the discursive world of Filarco, women are polemical, easily angered, and bent on

revenge.52 This connection between love and anger is not entirely new, even

though in the medical literature of the time, love-understood as lovesickness, of course-is traditionally addressed in the chapter devoted to melancholy. We find this connection explicitly mentioned in Dino del Garbo's commentary on Cavalcanti's "Donna me prega" as well as in various writings by Boccaccio.53 The close relationship between Cavalcanti and Boccaccio, who in fact places Cavalcanti in the prologue of the fourth day of the Decameron, a day devoted to the discussion of those whose love ended unhappily, offers a very interesting perspective from which to investigate Alberti's love model. Cavalcanti, and particularly the "light" Cavalcanti-as-character in the fourth day of the Decameron, should be read and re-read together with Boccaccio's Filocolo and Fiammetta. When in these texts Boccaccio

51 See H. v. Kamptz, Homerische Personennamen: Sprachwissenschaftliche und historische Klassifikation (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1982) 73-74.

52See "gareggiare" in S. Battaglia, ed., Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Torino: UTET, 1961-2004), where the only occurrences of the words with this meaning are found in works by Alberti. Suffice it here to mention Alberti, Deifira, "Sono le femmine, come ciascuno palese vede, di natura troppo gareggiosa, e in ogni cosa troppo go- dono contrapporsi e soprastare contendendo" (L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, cit., 233, and further 234, 242). Alberti uses the same qualification to characterize the behavior of the contentious servant, see L. Bertolini, "Servi albertiani," Studi linguistici italiani 22 (1996): 223-30.

53See the arguable but significant explanation of the title of his Filocolo offered by Marco Guazzo in the introduction to his 1530 edition, II Philocolo di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio novamente corretto (Vinegia: Francesco Bindoni & Mapheo Pasyni compagni, 1530) 2v, "in vero l'auttore non volse Philocopo e manco Philopono [some readers had suggested these two variants to the original title by Boccaccio], ma philocolo vuolse dire, come fin hora e stato nomato, perche philos vuol dire amatore, & cholos ire ... dunque ponendo philos & cholos insieme dicono amator ire seu ira amoris come fu la vera intentione del poeta; assignando l'ira de amore havere condotto il detto Philo- colo contra il comando del proprio patre alla liberatione della sua cara amata," see G. Palmieri, "Filocolo philocaptus: lo stereotipo della melanconia amorosa," I castello, il convento, il palazzo e altri scenari dell'ambientazione letteraria, ed. M. Cantelmo (Firenze: Olschki, 2000). For the choleric implications of Cavalcanti's "Donna me prega," see N. Tonelli, "'De Guidone de Cavalcantibus physico' (con una noterella su Giacomo da Lentini ottico)," PerDomenico De Robertis. Studi offerti dagli allievifiorentini, ed. N. Tonelli (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2000) 459-508.

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talks about love in terms of furor, it is not necessarily obvious that he

only talks in terms of melancholy (as it has been purported), the love

exemplified by the character Filocolo is more precisely described in terms of both tristitia ("sadness") and ira ("anger").

Alberti reactivates here what was a rather new element in the Medieval discourse of love, a new element that actually subverted the traditional combination of love and melancholy, expressed in its most sophisticated form in Petrarch's Canzoniere. The focus on anger, rather than on melancholy, arises from a profound interest in the mechanisms of human interaction. The reflection on love doesn't yield, as in Petrarch, an investigation of the nature of the Self, which eventually steers the poet towards a journey of individual perfection; on the contrary, the reflection on love, as a result of its intimate connection with anger, elicits in Alberti an in-depth exploration of the nature of the human community.

Love as Simulation

But how is Pallimacro to behave in this battle? In the prologue to

Deifira, the dialogue itself gives voice to two distinct options for

navigating the turbulent waters of love. The first position advocates a skillful embrace of love, the second a careful perusal of the emotional situation in order to define a strategy for an escape from the

perilous ambush of passion ("Read me well, lovers, and by acknowl-

edging here, with me, your own errors, you will become either more shrewd in loving or much more careful in fleeing love").54 The task of illustrating these two options is again entrusted to Filarco, whose discourse blends together the two divergent perspectives that Ovid

staged in his Ars amandi and his Remedia amoris. But the framework in which Filarco embeds his discourse also manifests a clear allegiance to Alberti's stoic promotion of good civic behavior ("And I believe

you will gain some useful advise to live beloved and honored by your fellow citizens").55 Filarco reads Ovid along the lines of the ancient tradition of diatribe, contemplating a series of "errors" and "reme- dies" against lovesickness, towards the goal of ultimately espousing

54"Leggetemi, amanti, e riconoscendo qui meco i vostri errori, diventerete o piu dotti ad amare o pii molto prudenti a fuggire amore." L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, cit., 223.

55L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, cit.: "E credo imparerete qualche utilita a vivere amati e pregiati da' vostri cittadini."

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a prudent avoidance of love all together.5 The art of love, that Ovid so ironically and astutely composed to facilitate the loving approach, becomes in Filarco's words a fake game of seduction:

One should first contemplate which acts, which glances, which words, in which way each little thing is better and more useful to you and more ac-

ceptable to the one you love. And never, in the smallest thing, be anything but grateful and jolly: avoid being too taciturn, avoid pompous speech, ask

kindly, listen graciously, gaze sweetly, joke playfully, tease coquettishly, and in all these things show ease, courteous manner, and levity; and please her with whichever of your virtue you can show her, proffer yourself to her in such a way that it cannot scorn her, leave her in such a way that she will desire you, return to her so that she will welcome you, listen to you, gaze at you happily, always leave things so that she thinks happy and amorous

things of you. And in this way go on nourishing love with sweet and joyful conversation.57

The spontaneous but fleeting moment of flirting is here replaced by flattery, the second stage of Alberti's love phenomenology. The solution to the battle seems to be found in a new form of interaction,

along the lines of a harmless and protective loving-a kind of false

flirting, which merely simulates the one that has been lost. The loss that the amorous instinct incurs owing to a skillful repression and sublimation of love is profitably counterbalanced by an eroticization of everyday interaction, with women, men, patrons, and colleagues. In this way, Filarco's doctrine aestheticizes instinctual renunciation: on the one hand, love becomes more civilized; on the other, civil relations in general are eroticized and become raw material to be

minutely elaborated. This process of aestheticization only partially strips away the men-

acing presence of suspicion, which, as we already saw, represents the physiological consequence of the mental fixation love brings

56For a series of topoi related to the cynic-stoic diatribe also present in Alberti's love writings, see R. K. Bultmann, DerStil derpaulinischen Predigt und die kynisch-stoische Diatribe (G6ttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1984 [1910]), 36.

57R. K. Bultmann, Der Stil der paulinischen Predigt., 229-30, "si vuole fra se prima pensare che atti, che guardi, che parole, in che modo ogni minima cosa sia meglio e pii utile a te e piu accetto a chi tu ami, e mai esserli in cosa alcuna ben minima se non grato e giocondo: tacere non troppo, parlare non superbo, chiedere gentile, ascoltare grazioso, rimirare dolce, motteggiare festivo, sollazzare vezzoso, e in ogni cosa usare facilita, costume e leggiadra maniera, e piacerli in qualunque virti di te possi mostrarli, profferirteli tale ch'ella non ti sdegni, partirsi tale ch'ella ti disideri, ritornare ch'ella s'allegri vederti, udirti, e rimirarti, sempre lasciarli che pensare di te cosa pur lieta e amorosa, e cosi sempre seguire pascendo amore di dolci e giocondi ragionamenti."

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about and the pivotal reaction towards its eventual deterioration. The overheated mind of the lover contemplates its object of desire almost like a painted image, but the poses, the gestures, the traits of the beloved are in fact only a mental representation of the real

person. The inevitable asymmetry between this fictional image and the real one reveals painful discrepancies; and the inability of the lover to evaluate their intimate motivations deprives him or her of the faculty to perceive the beloved in his or her lively proportions. For the potential lover, the best solution would be to dissimulate his or her desire through a simulation of flirting, in order to keep love's declaration for the moment in which he or she is positively confident in the concrete possibility of its satisfaction: before, Filarco says, love follows its natural path.58 But when love does follow its path, taming suspicion may become the most difficult undertaking. At this stage, any art of love demonstrates itself to be incapable of curing the lover of his perverse paranoia. Only time and escape may rescue him or her from total despair. Filarco's seductive doctrine represents, therefore,

only a precautionary technique, not a cure, as he is forced to admit at the end of the dialogue:

Flee, Pallimacro, where you may not see or hear mention of Deifira, nor of her mother, her sisters, or of any of her relatives. For if you stay away, love will exhaust its strengths and stop pursuing you. If not overly nourished in leisure, through cheerful gazes and sweet chats, love perishes.59

Pallimacro, the mask of the elegiac lover per antonomasia, remains

ultimately consistent in his love for Deifira. His final reply to Filarco is offered as an elegant mosaic of pieces taken from Catullus' Carmen VIII (12-19) and Boccaccio's Filocolo:

Goodbye, my homeland, goodbye, my friends. Pallimacro, too faithful and too submissive a lover, flees to foreign countries, to live tearfully in exile. And you, my Deifira, now without me, what kind of life lies in store for you? Who will come to greet you? Who will come to you to make you happy? Who will pursue you with great love? For whom will you beautify yourself? Who will praise you? Who will ever honor you as much as I do? You, young

58"Per6 si vuole non mai scoprirsi amante, se non quando vedi potere subito prima satisfarti che l'amore pigli suo' vizi." L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Gray- son, cit., 237.

59"Fuggi, Pallimacro, lungi, dove tu ne vegga ne oda ricordare Deifira, ne madre ne sorelle ne de' suoi alcuno. Quanto piu te scosterai, tanto pif si stracchera l'amore a perseguitarti. L'amore non molto nutrito in ozio di lieti sguardi e dolci ragionamenti perisce." L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, cit., 244.

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and beautiful, will you seat among other women without one who highly commends your beauty? or will it please you to give yourself to new lovers? For you have so erroneously refused and dismissed he who you more than himself loved, loves, and always will continue to love.60

Love as Consistency

This sublimation through a polite conversation denotes for Alberti a

defeat, not so much with respect to love, but rather with respect to

contingency: the fleetingness that impairs flirtation. The reasons are

given in a passage of his Ecatonfilea:

To me it seems but a want of sense to love those idle and tame creatures who for want something to do practice lovemaking almost as a business and an art, and wander about in their pretty wigs and slashes and little embroideries and liveries that show their foolishness, and wander around

trifling and talking. Avoid them, my daughters, avoid them: for men like these are not able to love. When they spend their days in promenading it is not that they are following you; they are only trying to escape from boredom.6'

60"Addio, patria mia, addio, amici miei. Pallimacro, troppo fedele e troppo suggetto amante, fugge in terre strane a vivere piangendo in essilio. E tu, Deifira mia, ora sanza me che vita sara la tua? Chi verra a salutarti? Chi tornera spesso a farti lieta? Chi seguira te molto amando? A chi ti porgerai tu ornata? Chi ti lodera ? Chi quanto io mai ti rendera onore? Tu, giovinetta e bella, sederai fra l'altre sanza avere chi molto pregi le tue bellezze, o te piacera donare a nuovi amanti? Poich6 tu cosi hai a torto escluso e gittato chi te piui che se stesso amava, ama e sempre amera." L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, cit., 245. The text by Catullus reads as follows: "Vale puella, iam Catullus obdurat, / nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam. / At tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla. / Scelesta, uae te, quae tibi manet uita? / Quis nunc te adibit? cui videberis bella? / Quem nunc amabis? Cuius esse diceris? / Quem basiabis? Cui labella mordebis? / At tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura." As for Boccaccio (who allegedly did not know Catullus' poem), the passages in question are the following ones: "'Oim&!-disse Fileno-dunque lascer6 io Marmorina e la vista di Biancifiore?'. 'Si-gli rispose quelli-per lo tuo migliore'. Disse Fileno: "Certo io non conosco che vantaggio qui eleggere si possa se solo una volta si muore. Buono e il vivere, ma meglio e tosto morire che vivendo languire, e cercare la morte, e non poterla avere" (3.31, 241); "O misero Fileno, piangi, per6 che la fortuna t'e piu awersa che ad alcuno. Sogliono gli altri, per odiare o per male operare, lasciare i loro paesi, o tal volta morire; ma a te per amore conviene che tu vada in essilio. Or che vita sara la tua? Sara dolente; ma certo io non la voglio lieta. Io conosco Biancifiore turbata, e scoprirmi il falso amore, mostrando nel viso d'avermi per adietro ingannato. Io mi fuggiro del suo cospetto, e fuggiendomi piacer6 a Florio e a lei, l'amore dei quali m'era occulto quando m'innamorai. II velo da lei ricevuto sara sola consolazione e della mia miseria," see G. Boccaccio, Filocolo, 3.31 and 3.32, ed. Antonio Enzo Quaglio (Milano: Mondadori, 1998) 241 and 243.

61 "E parmi poca prudenza amare questi oziosi e inerti, e' quali per disagio di faccende fanno l'amore suo quasi essercizio e arte, e con sue perucchine, frastagli, ricamuzzi e livree, segni della loro leggerezza, vagoli e frascheggiosi per tutto discorrono. Fuggiteli

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Alberti here advances a different solution, the society and the city he has in mind are different, as a reference to his De re aedificatoria proves. This solution suggests in fact the embracement of love. This is what Alberti tells us in Ecatonfilea, his very last writing on love, a monologue performed by a woman who attempts to redefine the feelings of love so as to avoid the disastrous consequences of passion. It is interesting that this monologue takes place in a theater before the masked actors enter the scene. The monologue is thus situated in a kind of symbolic stage prior to the degeneration of flirting caused by simulation. Call it the stage of sincerity. Through Ecatonfilea, Alberti seems to advocate a

type of love that is free of fiction, suspicion, jealousy, in a word, from

devastating passion-a love that, as such, can be experienced with

happiness and fullness. The last recommendation that Ecatonfilea addresses to the women of Florence reads as follows:

Now open yourselves to loving as much as you want to be loved. No en- chantment, no magical herb, no spell has more power to make you loved than loving. Love, then; trust those who love you, and those who love you will sustain for you equal measure of faith and love. Relinquish all suspicion, scorn, and contentiousness, and you will live, through love, happy and content.62

Only one element distinguishes this interaction from the flirting as encounter to which I referred earlier. Here, the lover is not chosen

randomly, but is chosen because he is a learned man, and only the learned and skillful man, Ecatonfilea maintains, is capable of living within the swing of things. This is what he has learned not just from

books, but through a kind of additive and agglutinative education

capable of unifying different cultural values in great density. This agglutination of different skills and experiences is beautifully

portrayed in Picturae ("Paintings"), in which Alberti describes the

image of Mater Humanitas as the ultimate warrior against Fortuna. The setting is an Indian temple, whose walls are decorated with two

parallel series of female images. Here is the startling way in which he

questi, figliuole mie, fuggiteli, per6 che questi non amano, ma cosi logorano passeg- giando il di non seguendo voi ma fuggendo tedio." L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, cit., 204.

62"Ora disponetevi tanto amare quanto desiderate essere amate. Niuno incanto, niuna erba, niuna malia pii si truova possente a farvi amare quanto molto amare. Amate adunque, e fidatevi di chi v'ama, e chi voi amate serbera a voi pari fede e amore. Deponete sospetti, sdegni e gare, e cosi viverete, amando, felicissime e contentissime." L. B. Alberti, "Deifira," Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, cit., 211.

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introduces Humanitas, in a manner that recalls the Indian goddess Kali, the goddess of creation, preservation, and destruction, as the

animating force of Shiva, the lord of the Dance:

On the other side of the wall . . . is painted an extraordinary image of a women, around whose neck are gathered various faces, young, old, happy, sad, joyful, serious, and so forth. Numerous hands extend from her shoulders, some holding pens, other lyres, some a polished gem, others a

painted or carved emblem, some various mathematical instruments, and others books. Above her is written: Humanity, mother.63

This image perfectly represents the loving chameleon with whom Ecatonfilea aims to flirt, the only lover able to engage in a truly dynamic flirtation, a flirtation like a dance. The perfect lover, as well as the perfect humanist, aims at a form of consistency (call it concinnitas, if you prefer). He or she is committed to finding in his or her life a

point of anchorage, an ubi consistam, that doesn't achieve the coherence of a biography constructed after the fact, as in Petrarch, but rather a consistent and immanent Self that holds together, like an amalgam, constantly mixed and worked over without ever losing its unity, and

yet able at the same time to take different forms.64 Going back to

63"Diverso parietis ordine quina quoque altera expicta signa succederunt. Namque loco primo mira imago adest picte mulieris, cui plurimi variique unam in cervicem vultus conveniunt: seniles, iuveniles, tristes iocosi, graves, faceti et eiusmodi. Complurimas item manus ex iisdem habet humeris fluentes, ex quibus quidem alie calamos, alie lyram, alie laboratam concinnamque gemmam, alie pictum exculptumque insigne, alie mathematicorum varia instrumenta, alie libros tractant. Huic superadscriptum nome: HUMANITAS MATER." L. B. Alberti, Intercenales, eds. F. Bacchelli and L. D'Ascia, cit., 176. For Alberti's access to Brahmanic culture and philosophy, see the commentary on the text provided by D'Ascia.

64Illuminating on this crucial point Bodei, 286, "Come ignorare che vi e, di regola, una qualche fisiologica continuita dell'esperienza significativa, un lavorio incessante e inconsapevole di ricerca e ritrovamento di un baricentro, di un ubi consistam, che ridistribuisce, spesso per default, pensieri, ricordi e affetti attorno a un punto centrale e mobile capace di travalicare le censure dell'oblio, cosi che, per lo piui, sappiamo di essere gli stessi di ieri e speriamo di riconoscerci, anche domani, come quelli di oggi?" See also G. Turnaturi, Flirt, seduzione, amore: Simmel e le emozioni (Milano: Anabasi, 1994), esp. ch. 4, "Una questione di consistenza," 119-36; and D. Sparti, L'importanza di essere umani: Etica del riconoscimento (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2003) 75-98, heavily based on Cavell's idea of "acknowledgment," see S. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969) 238-66. Recent trends in Italian philosophy, still unknown to the American public, may offer a new theoretical framework to steer the research on Italian humanism away from the current stagnation towards a far more compelling debate. This debate, conducted in Italy with the awareness of a needed reconciliation between continental and analytical positions, stages the discussion on Italian humanism not as a competing theory of the moral life, but rather as a tradition

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the allegorical meaning of the tale of the fauns and the moon, this consistent Self is not achieved "from books alone," but rather "by our own intense efforts."65 Alberti's Self, diffracted in a theater of masks and characters, is staged as a work in progress, as something always fermenting, growing, and changing, and yet revolving around a vital core, like a painting constructed following the principles of one point perspective.66 It is a core that reflects a mosaic of different encounters, exchanges, and abilities that makes him capable of improvising and

interacting as subject-a subject, I would finally add, free to love.

University of Pennsylvania

of moral life, a tradition that is now acquiring a strong philosophical import. See, for a practical example, Cavell's idea of "moral perfectionism," in S. Cavell, Conditions Hand- some and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990) 1-17, and, more recently, in his Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), in its entirety.

65For the importance of this concept with regard to Alberti's theory of architecture, see A. G. Cassani, Lafatica del costruire: Tempo e materia nel pensiero di Leon Battista Alberti (Milano: Unicopli, 2000).

66Truly emblematic, in this regard, is Alberti's personal motto "Quid tum?" attached to the image of the "winged eye," see R. Watkins, "L. B. Alberti's Emblem, the Winged Eye, and his Name, Leo," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 9 (1959-60): 256-58; L. Schneider, "Leon Battista Alberti: Some Biographical Implications of the Winged Eye," Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 261-70; C. Smith, "The Winged Eye: Leon Bat- tista Alberti and the Visualization of the Past, Present and Future," The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, eds. H. A. Millon and V. Magnago Lampugnani (Milano and New York: Rizzoli, 1994) 452-61; A. G. Cassani, "Un possibile avistamento di un Occhio alato albertiano," Albertiana 1 (1998): 81-85, and, by the same author, "Expli- canda sunt mysteria: L'enigma albertiano dell'occhio alato," Leon Battista Alberti: Actes du Congres International de Paris (Sorbonne-Institut de France-Institut culturel italien-College de France, 10-15 avril 1995), eds. F Furlan and A. P. Filotico, vol. 1 (Paris: Vrin, Torino: Aragno, 2000) 245-304.

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Leon Battista Alberti and Love