BOOK: Leon Battista Alberti, "Dinner Pieces"

Leon Battista Alberti: Dinner Pieces. Vol. 1. Edited by Roberto Cardini. Translated by David Marsh. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 97. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674295742. xxxi + 363 pp.

Leon Battista Alberti: Dinner Pieces. Vol. 2. Edited by Roberto Cardini. Translated by David Marsh. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 98. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674295742. vi + 359 pp.

By now we've seen several works by Alberti in the I Tatti Renaissance Library (his Biographical and Autobiographical Writings; Momus, a novel; and Philodoxus, a comedy) and there's definitely a pattern here: nearly all these works of his are (supposed to be) comical, or satirical, or humorous, and at pretty much no point have I been able to appreciate the comedy, satire or humour in them; in fact most of the time I couldn't quite see the point of such writings at all, so that I can only conclude, with considerable regret, that I'm missing the point of Alberti's work completely and that I'm definitely not part of the intended target audience for it.

The present work, Dinner Pieces, is a collection of about 50 short pieces, the shortest of which are less than a page long, the longest run to maybe twenty pages or so, and most are toward the lower end of this range. Some are short stories or fables, many are dialogues and a few almost resemble one-act plays. In his preface Alberti hopes they will be “read over dinners and drinks” (vol. 1, p. 3), hence the title; I didn't try to read them over dinner, but I suspect that Alberti had a longer and more leisurely banquet in mind, and most of his dinner pieces would be too long for my dinners :)

A lot of the pieces are allegorical in a rather ponderous and drawn-out way. For example, 1.4 is a philosopher's dream in which human souls are struggling in a river, some on planks, some on boats, some with floats; the river, of course, is called Life. 3.1 describes a long series of alegorical paintings of virtues and vices. In 3.7, Truth and Reason uproot a monstrous plant called Suspicion. In Appendix 2.2, the protagonist (a stand-in for Alberti himself) has crafted twelve rings with various allegorical designs, whose meaning is then described at great length; they show how to live a virtuous life. On a somewhat related note, 8.2 is a long list of enigmatic teachings by ancient philosophers, along with their supposed interpretations, many by Alberti himself; for example, we are told that Plutarch “interprets the saying [by Pythagoras] ‘Abstain from beans’ to mean that we should shrink from public office” (¶12). It's nonsense like this that gives philosophy a bad reputation :(

4.1 is a dream-journey into a bizarre underworld; there's a river of human faces; lost things — empires, authorities, favours, the narrator's brain; crossing the river by riding an old hag while she swims on her back.* If there's any allegory behind all this, it's quite impenetrable to me. But it's insane enough that it might very well be based on an actual dream :)

[*This part of the story features one of the most hilarious passages in the whole book; it's like something straight out of an incel forum: “You can't imagine how loudly I laughed as I swam across this river. Men are ferried across by old women condemned to this task because as girls they acted haughty and cruel, and as hags practiced sorcery and witchcraft. [. . .] What's more, women's heads are completely empty, and thus provide an excellent means of crossing a river.” (¶39–40, 47) :)))]

Some pieces espouse Stoic ideas that were no doubt fresh back in Ancient Greece when the world was young, but are less so today (though they are no less true); some are more in the Cynic vein, content to mostly just show people at their worst. In 1.6 we see a group of recently enslaved Scythians giving their various opinions about their future life in capticity; they conclude that the little babies have it best, as they never knew life in freedom. In 2.4, we see an astrologer and his assistant collecting money from customers and then making worthless predictions. In 3.3, gods are looking for Justice, but she is not to be found anywhere on earth. In 4.2, various characters desire a garland from the beautiful maiden Praise, but are mocked by her ugly chaperone Envy; none are found worthy. In 4.3, a Cynic, advising Phoebus on which animals to change various groups of human souls into, vituperates them all mercilessly (in the end, he, too, is turned into an animal, a “gold-winged fly”). In 4.4, a group of talentless writers tries to enter the Temple of Fame (chaos ensues). In 4.6, a philosopher argues that the slave is really more free than his master, who is burdened with responsibility for his whole household and thus is himself a slave to Necessity; I hope that this is sarcastic, but it's honestly hard to tell :)) — and it reminded me a little of the arguments by modern-day capitalists (and their bootlickers), who like to pretend as if their life and work were harder and more stressful than that of their workers.

But the most sustained example of grim cynical pessimism is Appendix 2.1, where Neophronus, recently deceased, finds that his spirit is now able to move freely at will, and promptly experiences one disappointment after another. His wife laments him in public, but cheats with his steward... during his funeral :))) (¶67); his son is overjoyed at his death (¶117); his servants gather in his cellar, drinking his fine wines (¶139); his kinsmen curse him for not remembering them in his will, and rifle through his library in search of hidden valuables (¶174), destroying his manuscripts, the fruit of a lifetime's worth of literary study (¶250). All his actions in life had been in vain (¶361); “life is an evil to be shunned” (¶370); thoroughly disgusted with human nature, he is content to be and remain dead (¶392–7). — None of this is exactly wrong, but it's grim stuff nevertheless. Alberti shows people at their worst, but they aren't actually always as bad as this, though he might pretend otherwise.

A few of the pieces are critical of religion in what was probably a fairly daring way in his time. 1.2 is a dialogue in which one of the two interlocutors espouses boldly Stoic ideas about how gods don't intervene in the world and certainly don't listen to human prayers. In 2.6, priests argue which god to worship, but finding a coin on the altar, decide to worship that henceforth. In 3.6, the priests have “always revered and loved the wicked”.

Many pieces have some sort of moral lesson which, for the most part, is fairly conventional, neither particularly original nor particularly insightful. 1.5: have patience, but only as long as necessity requires it; 2.2: find a good middle path between frugality and avarice; 2.5: it's better to be thought a miser than to be thought poor; 3.2: flowers that, driven by ambition, came from the ground too early in spring, found themselves frosted by a cold wind; 3.4: how to treat captured enemies in war? he recommends keeping them as hostages, a middle road between killing them and releasing them; 3.5: an allegory in which stones come to regret their “eagerness for revolution”; 9.1: rely on yourselves and hope rather than despair (this particular piece also has the good feature of looking at least somewhat like a reasonably straightforwardly told story, as opposed to being just a pile of allegories like so many other pieces in this collection); 10.3: bend rather than break; 10.4: stick with established institutions.

I enjoyed 3.2, a short fable: a cock, realizing they are being fattened up for slaughter, refuses to eat; but then the farmer, seeing him all scrawny, thinks he is sick and slaughters him even sooner, to prevent the disease from spreading :))

Book 10 is almost entirely on political subjects. I liked 10.1, set in a community of birds; the Owl proposes that birds of prey, “who cannot scratch the ground for food”, should be provided with food by others; the Duck argues against this with arguments that are *exactly* like those of modern-day libertarians (tAxAtIoN iS sLaVeRy etc etc.). This argument carries the assembly, and the birds of prey then decide to take by force what has thus been denied them. The moral of the story is not exactly uplifting: “There are some citizens whom it is better to support with deference, rather than at peril to your life” (10.1.50); but I guess this made sense in the turbulent environment of renaissance Italy, with its constant risk of coups by powerful cliques and the like. Anyway, the part of this story that I found the most interesting was the libertarian-like arguments of the Duck, since they are so similar to ones made today. An important difference, of course, is that in the story it is the most powerful (i.e. the birds of prey), rather than the weakest, class of society that would be the recipients of the proposed system of welfare; it is easy to oppose that system while being in favour of the present-day welfare systems; but the Duck's libertarian arguments apply equally to both, and I despise those arguments regardless of the merits of the specifical welfare system under consideration.

In 10.2, a community of clouds asks Jupiter to assign them a king; he tells them to elect one themselves, and they promptly break into factional violence. Jupiter smiles, knowing this is a good way “to restrain and repress their aggressiveness” (10.2.48).

In 10.5, a community of fish and frogs living in a lake descends into factional conflict and even invites two outside rulers: the fish invite a snake, the frogs an otter, and both then rule as tyrants. Eventually the fish and frogs manage to mend their relations, overthrow the tyrants and live in harmony. (I guess this was of great contemporary relevance to Alberti, when foreign rulers were meddling in Italy's countless wars and occasionally were even invited to administer this or that city-state for a limited time.)

He has some favourite topics that he freqently returns to, and that we've already seen in the earlier ITRL volumes of Alberti's works, such the unprofitability of studying literature (though he persists in it anyway; 1.1, 4.5, Appendix 2.1, Preface to Book 4), or his distrust of women and marriage (7.1, 7.2, 11.2).

Several of the books have short prefaces, in which Alberti espouses some surprisingly reasonable and moderate ideas. In the preface to Book 7, he points out that many now wish to be good orators, but instead of practicing their own oratory, they waste time by criticizing others. Alberti thinks we can't expect everyone to be great orators, and should be content with what contemporary writers are able to accomplish. In the preface to Book 10, he calls for more “goodwill and affection” between scholars, and less detraction; they all strive for “virtue and glory”; and they can bond over hating the “ignorant masses” :)

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Unlike with many other ITRL volumes, the translation (by David Marsh) in the present edition isn't new, but a reprint of a translation first published in 1987; at first sight it seems identical but I didn't compare it all that closely, so I guess that some minor changes have perhaps have been made to bring it in line with the Latin text (which is from Cardini's edition of 2010). Having taken a glimpse at the 1987 edition of Marsh's translation, I think that I find his introduction more useful and informative than Cardini's introduction in the present volume, but when it comes to endnotes it's just the opposite. I couldn't help feeling, while reading the introduction to the present edition, that Cardini has immersed himself so deep, and for so many decades, in the study of Alberti's work, that he wasn't able to write his introduction at the level needed by a reader completely unfamiliar with these things, such as me (and there's nothing wrong with that, of course; I'm not *really* the target audience for these books).

For example, I must be blind, but I couldn't even find any explanation as to why Book 4 of the Dinner Pieces is immediately followed by Book 7. What happened to Books 5 and 6? The answer, according to Marsh's introduction (pp. 1, 9 in his 1987 edition), is that the work was not printed early on, like most of Alberti's works have been, and has survived only in a few manuscripts, none of which happens to include Books 5 and 6. (Incidentally, the first printed edition, from 1890, is available on archive.org, but contains only about half of the material now known.) Anyway, I thought this was quite interesting; I vaguely remembered Alberti as a 15th-century figure, and I thought of the 15th century as already within the age of printing; but I guess it stands to reason that printing got established only gradually over the course of that century, and manuscripts still remained important for a while.

Nevertheless some parts of the introduction were very interesting. For example, it points out that for earlier humanists such as Petrarch, humanism was mostly about reading and writing of books: “Petrarch placed architects, painters, and sculptors among the practitioners of the ‘mechanical arts’ ” (vol. 1, p. xv); by contrast, Alberti promoted a “nonbookish concept of humanity” in which “painting and sculpture, music and goldsmithing, astronomy and astrology, mathematics and geometry” (ibid.) had an equal part with reading and writing. I guess this helps explain why he keeps ranting about how useless the study of literature is :)

I was also interested to learn that Alberti's real name was Battista; Leone was just a pen-name (p. xxvi). He was an illegitimate child but later obtained a papal dispensation for it, which allowed him to progress in his career (p. xxvii).

As for the English translation, it has one very interesting characteristic: in nearly all the other ITRL volumes, the English translation is a good deal longer than the Latin original, but here the English translation is shorter by about the same amount. I'm not suggesting that we should accuse the translator of omitting anything; in the present edition, every sentence is numbered (both in the Latin and in the English text) and accounted for. I guess that Marsh simply uses a more efficient style, and from time to time I couldn't help wishing that the other translators in the ITRL series would follow his example.

But I have to protest against Marsh's use of “zombie friend” (4.6.27) to translate cadaverosum hospitem. It feels very anachronistic, since you can't help but be reminded that in Alberti's time, the Europeans hadn't even discovered America yet, let alone colonized Haiti, populated it with African slaves and waited for zombie folklore to emerge there.

The editor's introduction to the present volume has an interesting remark that “[t]he Latin of the Dinner Pieces is a delicious mélange” (vol. 1, p. viii), mixing many different styles, but I can't say that I noticed this in the translation; but perhaps I just don't have a sufficiently sensitive ear for style to notice it.

A funny tidbit from the notes: in 1441 Alberti sponsored a competition “for the best poetic composition in Italian. [. . .] the jury, made up of Latin-writing humanists, spitefully refused to pick a winner” :)) (vol. 1, p. 344).

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Anyway, what to say at the end? Alberti's Dinner Pieces were not really my cup of tea overall, but readable enough in small quantities; and since I wasn't expecting anything more from the book, I can't say that I was in any way disappointed by it.