BOOK: Leon Battista Alberti, "Biographical and Autobiographical Writings"

Leon Battista Alberti: Biographical and Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Margin McLaughlin. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 96. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674292680. xxvii + 346 pp.

We have encountered Alberti in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before — one of the early volumes is his satirical novel, Momus. I (re-)read it a few years ago (see my post about it), but didn't like it very much, mostly because I didn't find its brand of humour particularly funny. The present volume brings us five shorter works by him, and I didn't like these very much either, so I'm starting to conclude that I'm just not the right person to appreciate Alberti's writing. The fact that the works here are shorter at least had the advantage that I was never at any real risk of getting bored by them.

Often I felt that he was more interested in showing off his rhetorical skills and his ability to deploy an endless amount of allusions to classical literature than in saying something interesting, original, entertaining or persuasive. His Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature presents us such a pointlessly exaggerated view of the disadvantages that it's hard to believe that he meant it seriously; his Life of St. Potitus is suffering from the problem that it can't tell us much of a story because so little is known about this highly obscure saint; his Dog is based on a silly gimmick: he writes about his dog using tropes from classical biographies of great men, and in doing so he mostly misses the opportunity to express sincerely his feelings for his recently deceased and much beloved canine companion; in his Autobiography, Alberti writes about himself in such glowing terms that it's hard to take him quite seriously, and at the same time he tells us almost nothing about the actual course of his life; and lastly, his Fly praises this animal in the most exaggerated and undeserving terms, a contrast which is supposed to provide humour but which in practice soon grew just as tiresome as the insect itself.

I don't deny that there is originality and variety here, but there are also so many missed opportunities for a work to be about more than just a gimmick and an exercise in style. Overall I just couldn't feel very excited about any of the works in this volume. Thank goodness that nobody reads this blog any more, so that at least I won't be getting hostile comments for admitting that I didn't enjoy the book :)

On the other hand, I have to praise the translator for the interesting introduction and notes, and especially for making a good effort to translate the occasional puns and word-play (see e.g. p. 93, ¶30).

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature

This is the longest work in this volume, but unfortunately it wasn't much to my liking. The subject, of course, is an old and well-trodden one, and I didn't have the impression that Alberti had anything particularly original to say about it; the whole thing is better thought of as a youthful exercise in rhetoric (he himself speaks of the importance of practicing writing; 1.15), and the editor of the present volume calls it an invective on more than one occasion (pp. ix, 292), though unlike Petrarch's invectives that I read many years ago in one of the early ITRL volumes, Alberti's treatise is not directed against any particular individual. But what he does have in common with Petrarch is that rather than trying to be sober and fair and balanced, they deliberately fight dirty with all sort of exaggerations, biases and rhetorical tricks in the service of their goals. Alberti's gimmick is basically to spend the first and last 5% of the work on the advantages of literature, and the intermediate 90% on its disadvantages, so as to make it seem more impressive that he is nevertheless committed to the study of literature despite its immense disadvantages.

Incidentally, what he means by literature here is very broad, basically any sort of study that revolves largely on reading (preferably in Latin) — he includes even lawyers, notaries and physicians among the students of literature. He deliberately takes an unhealthily extremist attitude towards study, so as to have a good excuse to play up its disadvantages; in his view, a student of literature should pore over his books day and night (2.16–22), smell badly of lamp oil (5.39), be a pale and scrawny nerd that people will shun and almost literally point and laugh at (3.10–13); even the slightest interruption to his studies will cause him to forget so much that he will have to spend many hours catching up again (3.32, 45); nothing short of total non-stop dedication will do. Apart from the great expenditure of time and effort, it will also cost you a lot of money to pay for your studies, buy books etc. (4.16–18, 23). He is also aware of the idea of opportunity costs; as a student of literature, you are spending money when you could be making it.

He then proceeds to spend most of his treatise arguing at great length how all this effort and expense will yield you neither wealth not honours. He purports to justify this by indulging in some very dubious mathematics and statistics (4.88–112) to argue that out of every 1000 people who begin the study of literature, only three will “be able to make money from literature” (4.110). Only lawyers, notaries and physicians have some chance of making good money (4.137), but even of them most don't, especially if they are honest (4.144, 154). Nor can a literary scholar get rich by marriage, since women with a big dowry won't have him (4.184–91).

Not only do literary scholars get no wealth, they also get no respect. Alberti argues that they *deserve* the highest respect (5.4), but nobody actually respects them. Rich people will not be impressed by the literary scholar's rhetoric enough to give him a seat at the table when it comes to political decision-making (5.26–9); in fact they simply won't care about his learning; it means nothing to them (5.31–40). The common people won't respect him either, for the simple fact that he isn't rich (5.54, 65). Alberti is also doubtful about trying to win honour by serving in the public administration, as such jobs will distract you from literary study and “expose you to vanity and envy” (5.82).

It is only at the very end of the treatise that he finally returns to the advantages of the literature; he reasserts his commitment to this field of study; of course, that's why he expounded at such length on it disadvantages — the greater these are, the greater his merit is in nevertheless persisting in his studies. And perhaps he doesn't spend too much time on his advantages because he considers them obvious enough that it suffices to state them plainly: “Let the minds of scholars burn with a desire, not for gold or wealth, but for morals and wisdom, and let them learn from literature, not power and the causes of things, but the form and cult of virtue and glory” etc. (6.16–17). You will be rewarded by “peace of mind, the stability of virtue and the beauty of the arts” (6.26); “such a man [. . .] will believe that all his goods are placed within himself” (6.36).

This is a very charming view of literary scholarship, and of course one wishes to believe it; and yet, you can't help noticing that this is nothing more than argument by vigorous assertion. There used to be a widespread idea that studying ancient Greek and Roman literature somehow made you a better and wiser person; I think it was probably true, but that was back when people were still able to study literature earnestly. There would be no use in trying to revive the study of classical literature now that our entire intellectual class has, for the better part of a century, betrayed the rest of society by going in for modernism, postmodernism and other such corrosive ideologies; they know only how to criticize and deconstruct and play language games, but would react to the idea of holding a sincere opinion, or of searching in literature for truth and beauty, like a vampire to sunlight.

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Apparently Alberti conducted something of a poll: “I diligently asked many literature scholars” (2.3) and they all wanted to deter other people from studying literature rather than encourage them. You can read similar advice from humanities professors nowadays :)

Amongst the expenses involved in the study of literature he lists “those foolhardy ceremonies they call doctorates” (4.24) :))

When he talks about professions where it is easier to make money than in literature, he suggests soldiering and farming... He had a bizarrely rosy view of these: “no expectation is more certain from any other thing than what is reaped from a well cultivated field [. . .] the countryside offers [. . .] the maximum amount of leisure to enjoy the good life” (4.72). Clearly his idea of a farmer was a big landowner who doesn't actually do any farming himself, probably doesn't even bother running his own estate but has managers for that.

A hilarious quote from 4.180: “women are by nature stupid, arrogant, contentious, bold, insolent and rash” :)))) I don't disagree, but then men are all these things as well; it's just human nature :(

Alberti is commendably self-critical: “We have now reached the stage where [. . .] nobody except the most abject and lazy turns to literary studies. For it is the lame, or the scrofulous, or the distorted and diminished, the stupid, dense, inert people who are unable to incompetent to do any other work who all end up studying literature.” :)) (5.85–6)

The Life of St. Potitus

Alberti wrote this biography at the suggestion of his patron, a prelate named Biagio Molin (p. 293, n. 1); I wonder how he chose this obscure saint. Unsurprisingly, very little is known about Potitus, and as a result Alberti's biography can't help but be rather thin, even though he did his best to pad it out with long speeches and the like.

According to Alberti's biography, Potitus was originally from Serdica (present-day Sofia) and lived during the reign of the emperor Antoninus. The son of a rich pagan father, Potitus adopts christianity as quite a young man; ignoring his father's entreaties and arguments (e.g. that the authorities were persecuting christians pretty badly just then), the young zealot moves away from home. The devil tries to lure him away from his chosen path by appearing in the form of a phantom and then of an ox, but Potitus successfully ignores these manifestations. He successfully cures a senator's wife of leprosy by converting her to christianity.*

[*Alberti writes as if he didn't think very highly about this conversion (¶57): “Since the minds of the sick are credulous, the woman suffering from leprosy was willing to try anything if she thought it would do her good.”]

Soon, word of Potitus' miracle reaches the ears of the emperor, by a rather bizarre mechanism: the devil obsesses Antoninus' daughter and makes her tell him that Potitus is a christian and where he lives. Potitus is summoned before the emperor and, with god's help, easily drives out the devil out of the emperor's daughter. However, his subsequent interview with the emperor goes very badly indeed. Now, I'm the first to agree that zealots can be tiresome and Potitus is no exception, but the way Antoninus reacts here is just plain ridiculous. He goes on an unhinged rant (¶81–100) which levels the most implausible accusations against the christians: “there is no people on earth more abject than those who have decided to live all their life in leisure, rejecting both diligence and hard work. They shun, think little of and even hate military duty, literary study, and any ornamentation of life. You must realize that these same Christians are the most worthless race of men: they are lazy, idle, supine; they pursue no labor nor arts, undergo no civic discipline, but have learned to languish in idleness, solitude and sleep” (¶83–4). Holy shit, is he supposed to be for or against this thing? If christianity was like that, I'd convert in a heartbeat :))) But in actual fact, of course, I don't doubt that most christians in Antoninus' time were pretty normal people leading pretty normal lives; I suppose there may have been a few who tried to avoid participation in society as much as possible to avoid being dragged into its sins — but the idea that all or even most of them were like that, as Antoninus says, is just plain silly.

Anyway, the emperor sees that the people have been rather impressed by Potitus' miracle, and is worried that more of them might convert unless he makes an example of him. He tries to pressure Potitus into making a sacrifice to the pagan gods, and when the youth refuses, he is promptly taken to the amphitheatre, tortured with fire and then consigned to the beasts; but lo, another miracle, the beasts grow meek in his presence and worship him. The emperor sends his minions to finish the job by hacking Potitus to pieces, but a (probably unintentionally) comical scene ensues: “The executioners were seized by such zeal for carrying out his order that while trying to be the first to cut pieces off Potitus, they actually wounded each other, whereas the young man remained untouched” (¶106) :)) After another few similar failures, the emperor falls to the ground in a fit of rage and gets badly injured. His daughter implores Potitus — who is somehow *still* not dead — to save him, and she promptly converts to christianity to secure divine aid (¶110).

Antoninus recovers at once, but alas, his temper has not improved. He sees Potitus holding a sermon to the crowd, orders his tongue to be cut off, but Potitus continues speaking despite the lack of a tongue. Eventually they finally manage to kill him by cutting off his head (¶114). He was not yet fourteen years old (p. 171).

I can't say that I found this hagiography particularly enjoyable, though I'm sure that's not Alberti's fault, it's simply what this genre is like. The characters are shallow and two-dimensional; god and the devil intervene in events all the time; and there is something unpleasantly self-congratulatory about the whole thing. The writer and the reader both know that the saint or martyr will eventually triumph; there is never any doubt about the outcome, the story as a whole is predictable and only the details remain to be filled in.

I suppose the christians looked back at their early martyrs as the plucky underdogs who took on the mighty Roman empire and won, triumphed over all the persecutions and the like. And I suppose that a christian who lived in the 2nd century could justifiably consider himself the underdog; but not so in Alberti's time; someone who writes a hagiography in the 15th century is not a supporter of the plucky underdog, but of the establishment; he is the sore winner who has been absolutely triumphant for more than a thousand years yet still can't stop grinding the face of his long-defeated opponent into the dust.

From my perspective, of course, it is not christianity, but the Greco-Roman paganism that was the underdog; even in the 2nd century its days were numbered, and it was very much the underdog by the 4th. So when I read something like the life of Potitus here, I can't sympathize with the saints and martyrs, because I know that very soon they would win and become the oppressors in turn. Moreover, my sympathies are instinctively with the pagans, and I can never quite understand why people converted from paganism to christianity; my attitude can be summarized by Swinburne's lines: “What ailed us, o gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain?” Perhaps the problem is that ancient paganism, being long gone, is not so well known to us; we all see how many pleasures christianity denies its followers, and how many unpleasant duties and restrictions it lays upon them; for all I know, ancient paganism, as actually practiced, may well have had many of the same faults; but I know so much less about it that it is easy to see it in a more sympathetic light. You sometimes hear that the closest thing to a modern survival of the ancient pagan religions is hinduism, and that religion certainly looks like a total mess that doesn't seem to have much more to recommend itself than christianity does. Perhaps ancient Roman paganism would also seem less appealing if it survived into the present day.

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A funny passage from ¶42: at one point, the devil changed “into the color and shape of an ox; and that with a great mooing sound he struck the young man [i.e. Potitus] down” We're used to Satan appearing as a goat, but apparently even the poor ox is now to be distrusted. What's next, a kitten? :))

A fine passage from Antoninus' anti-christian rant: “My goodness, it is ridiculous the way they exaggerate when they speak. The heavens, all the gods, the world itself seem not to be enough for them to talk about; they actually descend to the underworld with their tales.” (¶92) You can practically see him getting enraged at the tiresome religious zealouts and missionaries who keep knocking at his door, trying to convert him :)

My Dog

This rather bizarre composition is again in some sense an exercise in rhetoric; Alberti says he was inspired by funeral oratory with which the ancients used to praise eminent men after their deaths (¶1–3); he apparently also wanted to prove that he could do such a thing better than a certain lesser orator (p. 211).

Anyway, the chief conceit of this piece, of course, is that it is written not for an eminent man, but for Alberti's dog. This is a neat idea and I liked it, but the execution leaves something to be desired; in principle seeing someone praise a dog in terms usually used of a person could make for very funny reading, but most of the time I didn't find Alberti's piece to be particularly funny. There are a few puns here and there, which mostly didn't make it into the translation (but the notes point them out); and at times you can have fun figuring out what certain features and character traits, described as if about a person, actually mean when applied to a dog; but most of the time you can't find any meaningful connection between his oration and a dog's life, and the effect is mostly just odd. As the translator's notes point out, Alberti often uses nearly the same phrases here which he would later reuse in his own autobiography (e.g. see notes 36, 38–9 on p. 306).

By way of illustration, here are a few of the stranger passages from this canine biography. The dog's “mother was distinguished for her piety” (¶9); his ancestors included practically every dog mentioned by any ancient author, and Alberti is tireless in rifling through the works of Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero and countless others for anecdotes in praise of dogs; “some were endowed with such courage and bravery” that they would fight “even an elephant [. . .] no matter how fierce and violent” (¶11). Alberti's dog combined the virtues of “the most renowned commanders” — Fabius Cunctator, the Scipios, Caesar, Alexander, etc. (¶30–1). He “mastered in just a few days all the liberal arts that are worthy of a wellborn dog” (¶44); “before he was three he could understand Greek and Latin as much as Tuscan” (¶46; I guess the joke is that he of course didn't understand any human language; there is some wit there, but you are hardly going to laugh out loud). Such was his dedication to the arts that he “would sometimes sing to the moon in various musical modes which he drew from the harmony of the spheres” (¶58). And he lacked the faults of many great men, e.g. he was not “ambitious like Cicero, who when he was almost exhausted from praising himself, in one of his letters then asked other people to write a book in his praise” ¶69). :))

My favourite part of this oration comes at the very end, when Alberti finally, for a brief while, drops the conceit and writes plainly and honestly about how much he loved his dog and how much he misses him (¶73–6). That brief moment of genuine feeling is worth more than the rest of the treatise combined.

My Life

This short autobiography of Alberti wasn't much to my liking either. First of all, the translator's notes at the end of the book point out so many parallels to various classical authors that I can't help wondering how much this is meant to be taken seriously as an autobiography at all, as opposed to being merely yet another exercise in rhetoric. Alberti writes about himself in the third person and doesn't hold back in attributing to himself all sorts of excellent qualities, abilities, talents and personality traits (even the power of divination :)) ¶77). If you can believe him, he really was the very archetype of the Renaissance man, constantly busy studying and working in a wide range of fields.

Meanwhile this autobiography is actually very bad if you expected any clear account of his actual life, rather than merely 20 pages of saying what a great guy he was. He tells us about his various literary works and briefly discusses each of them, which is nice, but other than that there's almost none of the things I would expect in an autobiography: nothing about his ancestors and family; where and how he grew up; his studies, his travels (I saw from passing mentions in the translator's notes that Alberti studied in Bologna, but he never mentions this in his autobiography here); his employments, if he had any (the impression one gets from the lack of this information in his autobiography is that he was simply an independently wealthy man who spent his time tinkering and writing, and who by dint of sheer grit and talent managed to become an important and influential humanist intellectual; but I wonder whether he really was wealthy, since we read at in the translator's notes that Alberti was an illegitimate child, who therefore couldn't take public office (p. 292, n. 24), and moreover that when his father died and left some money in his will to Alberti, the other family members refused to hand this money over).

An interesting feature of this autobiography is a longish list of his supposed witty sayings, which he was apparently able to come up with on the spur of the moment and in considerable abundance (¶40–107). I didn't actually find most of them to be all that witty, but then I already knew that humour is one of those things that doesn't travel well across centuries and cultural boundaries. Nevertheless here's one anecdote that I liked: when a foreigner in his city asked him the way to the palace of justice, Alberti said he didn't know; upbraided by some passers-by who pointed out that the courthouse was right there, he replied: “I had no recollection of justice ever having been in those premises” :)) (¶43).

He was in the “habit of dictating the first draft of his works”, which “accounts for the oral dimension of early drafts and the complex philology behind his texts” (translator's note 20, p. 313).

At the age of 20, he wrote a comedy, the Philodoxeos, which “circulated for ten years as though it had been written by a little-known ancient writer Lepidus”, until Alberti finally admitted his authorship (translator's note 8, p. 311). I like this idea; it proves that his Latin must have been really good, and moreover people might be less likely to criticize small defects if they believed the work was by a genuine ancient author.

I greatly liked his opinion about art: “He used to ask young boys whether they recognized whose likeness he was painting, and he used to deny that anything could be said to have been painted artistically that could not instantly be recognized by children.” (¶34.) How far we have fallen from this ideal after more than a century of degenerate art!

The Fly

Most of us would agree that the fly is an annoying and worthless creature, but in this short piece Alberti turns this on its head and spends the whole time praising the fly in the highest terms. Much as in the case of My Dog, I agree that this in principle a neat and humorous idea, but in practice I didn't find The Fly particularly funny.

The author pretends to uphold the flies as altogether nobler animals than “the bees, those unworthy favorites of the poets” (¶20; see also ¶4). They are descended from the Centaurs (¶4), a proud warrior race (which we can tell because swarms of flies always accompany human armies, ¶8, and because they always wear “a breastplate with varied colors of gold and bronze”, ¶12) which yet never commits atrocities like human armies do (¶15–16); honourable and sociable creatures, they do everything together and in the open (¶17, 19); they are scientists and philosophers (¶42), “endowed by nature with such enormous eyes that they can easily discover what lies hidden beyond the heavens” (¶25);* a true stoic, the fly “always shows itself to be of the same demeanor” (¶31); the fly “is never idle” and “energetically encourages the lazy to action” (¶39); etc. “We wrote the above laughing, and you too should laugh”, Alberti says at the end; but alas, I almost never did laugh. I don't disagree that there is wit in Alberti's praise of the fly; but it takes more than that to make one laugh.

[*The fly “even knows what blemishes Helen of Troy has on her bottom, has fondled all of Ganymede's hidden parts, and knows by constantly landing on them how bitter is the taste of Andromache's ancient, sagging breasts.” (¶26.) One of the few passages that actually made me laugh :)) ]

Miscellaneous

Apparently another of Alberti's works, the Intercenales or Dinner Pieces, “is forthcoming in this I Tatti Renaissance Library series” (p. xxvi, n. 23). Let's hope I will enjoy it better than the two Alberti volumes I've read so far :)

I was interested to learn (translator's note 36, p. 327) that the names of the musical notes come from “the first syllables in the lines of a famous medieval hymn to St. John the Baptist by Paulus Diaconus: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, mira gestorum famuli tuorum, solve polluti labii reatum”. From this we also see why so is sometimes called sol. The wikipedia says that ut was replaced by the now usual do in the 17th century, to make it an open syllable.

In his autobiography, Alberti mentions some of his works which he wrote in Italian rather than Latin; the thing I found interesting is that, where the translation says “in the vernacular” and “Tuscan” (p. 219, ¶13), the corresponding word in the original was “etruscos” both times. Of course, in one way it makes sense — the words ‘Tuscan’ and ‘Etruscan’ are related — but on the other hand it sounds a little as if he had written those works in the ancient Etruscan language, and that is a very intriguing alternative-historical idea :)