Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City by Caspar Pearson

Author:Caspar Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271048550
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

The reflections on the city are consistent with those that are either expressed or implied earlier in the treatise. The urban environment is not a healthy one. Indeed, since it is full of festering piles of filth that have accumulated over hundreds of years, it is very much the locus of bad air—precisely the thing that was widely held to cause illness and plague in the fifteenth century. We have previously seen how issues of this kind are bound up with social concerns about the lower orders that lead Alberti to contemplate the separation of classes and a move to the more spacious peripheries of cities. We have also seen how the physical diseases of the city find their correlation in mental diseases, and how the country can help one to avoid both and perhaps even offer a remedy.

Alberti stipulates that the hortus should be equipped with all of the uplifting delight of the villas, which he has described in the fifth book. His evocation of lawns, meadows, groves, and limpid springs is reminiscent of the language used by Giannozzo and Lionardo when describing the country—language that is redolent of clarity, purity, and salubriousness:

It is useful both to have the city close by and to have places to which you withdraw easily and do what you will. [Et urbi sane vicina iuvant facilesque recessus, ubi quae libeant, ex libidine liceant.] A place close to town, with clear roads and pleasant surroundings, will be popular. A building here will be most attractive, if it presents a cheerful overall appearance to anyone leaving the city, as if to attract and expect visitors. . . . I would make the road leading up to it rise so gently that visitors do not realize how high they have climbed until they have a view over the countryside. Meadows full of flowers, sunny lawns, cool and shady groves, limpid springs, streams, and pools, and whatever else we have described as being essential to a villa—none of these should be missing, for their delight as much as for their utility.22

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