Grafton's book is a fine example of library-based American academic research in that it takes us exhaustively through everything that anyone else has ever said about Alberti. It is hard going in places. As befits an author who had an unexpected success in 1998 with his "The Footnote: a curious history", there are no fewer than 58 pages of notes at the back of this book. As a consequence, it is not exactly clear what Grafton's own view is on the man. Nor has he any great new theory to unveil, but he makes one thing very obvious: nothing in Alberti's life ever happened by chance. He even wrote his own "biography" under a pseudonym, while quite young, so as to maintain his image intact.
"He made his life, until the end, a conscious performance and a continuous act of reflection on the problems that had gripped him since his troubled, isolated, youth," Grafton concludes. Not that we find out much about these problems, though there are hints. As an illegitimate child of a good family, whose rightful legacy was seized by others, Alberti had to struggle at first to make his way and gain the confidence of the establishment. This may account partly for his seemingly prudish character, as a person who, as Grafton points out, was more at home with the mating habits of horses than he was of humans.
But steering clear of fleshly distractions allowed Alberti to develop his own public persona. One of the most revealing things he wrote, late in life, was essentially a how-to-do-it guide to being a famous creative type. "It is necessary above all," he wrote around 1470, "to control your gestures and countenance and your motions and your entire appearance with a very precise examination and with a very correct form of art, so that nothing seems to be done with tricks that require extensive thought, but the onlooker thinks that all of your accomplishment is the innate gift of nature."
How many of Alberti's gifts were innate, how many were the product of secret, sweaty toil? Florence and Ferrara were powerful but relatively small like many of the independent north Italian city-states. Rome was still in a depopulated, ruinous state, the papacy only recently restored. Alberti's great skill as a courtier was to realise that, in each place, there was only a relatively small number of powerful and influential people to get on side. Grafton recounts how he systematically got to know them all, usually by befriending intermediaries who may or may not have realised they were being used in this way. Alberti also played the old trick of dedicating his books to people he wanted to be associated with - among them the great Brunelleschi. It worked. He wormed his way in. He got himself a generous stipend from the church which allowed him to pursue his academic goals.
The greatest of which came relatively late in life. By then famous as an antiquary, mathematician, critic and what would nowadays be called a social commentator, he had become a consultant on architectural and engineering matters - possibly even to Pope Nicholas V, the great rebuilder of Rome. Opinions differ as to how much Alberti was involved in that rebuilding, or even if he was involved at all (nor does Grafton illuminate us). But when Alberti came to study and interpret a key classical text - Vitruvius's somewhat muddled 1500-year-old treatise on architecture - the result was a masterpiece in its own right.
Some see Alberti's "On the Art of Building", first published in full posthumously in 1486, as Year Zero of the modern world. I'm not so sure. True, it was the first theoretical text which extolled the virtues of architecture as an art and showed how it could be done. But the preceding medieval period had produced enormous technological and aesthetic advances also, not least in the structural audacity and beauty of Gothic cathedrals - an inconvenient fact that both Alberti and Grafton ignore.
You might be tempted to conclude that - outside architecture - Alberti had little of the natural creative talent of the real artists of his day, let alone those of the following two centuries. He seems to have thought, for instance, that great art could be produced by purely technical means. He anticipated Le Corbusier by many centuries in describing houses as machines for living in. He even set out the principles of the first garden suburbs. But his realised architecture is anything but drily academic. Few and incomplete though they are, these are inventive, joyful buildings. It makes you wonder what else he made that has been lost - and what more he might have achieved in any one area, had he not been so dead set on being pretty good at everything. Then again, if Alberti had specialised, there might have been no Renaissance.
