Glory, Passions and Money in Alberti’s Della famiglia: A Humanist Reflects on the Foundations of Society

Abstract

The article examines Alberti’s dialogue Della famiglia (“On the Family”) as a reflection on the foundations of ethics and politics from the perspective of humanist discourse. The polyphonic work presents and critically examines several views. The authorial voice of the text rehearses the traditional philosophical view the humanists inherited, according to which humans are sociable by nature. However, some of the interlocutors reject this convenient view, implying that it cannot be squared with the humanist critique of the premises of mainstream classical and medieval philosophy. Another line of argumentation in the dialogue attempts to harness the key humanist notion of gloria as the basis of human association, according to which humans self-interestedly seek fame and glory but to gain them they must promote the common good. But also this position is contested in the dialogue, with some arguing that the agonistic competition for glory produces envy and resentment rather than a civic spirit and as such threatens social cohesion. Finally, Della famiglia also explores the implications of the radical possibility that men and women are asocial creatures, by casting them as selfish economic actors who are only interested in making material gains.

Notes

1. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Phaidon Press, 1965), 85–87. This view was elaborated in great detail by Joan Gadol in Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1969).

2. Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (New York: B. Blackwell, 1965), 61–65. With some reservations this is also Cecil Grayson’s interpretive direction as, for example, in “The Humanism of Alberti,” in Studi su Leon Battista Alberti, ed. Paola Claut (Florence: Olschki, 1998), 129–48.

3. See, for example, Eugenio Garin, “Studi su L. B. Alberti,” in Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1975), 131–96. In fact Garin revised his interpretation of Alberti soon after the publication of Italian Humanism. On Garin’s evolving understanding of Alberti, see Sebastiano Gentile, “In Memoriam: Eugenio Garin (1909–2004) e Leon Battista Alberti,” Albertiana 9 (2006): 3–27.

4. The most thorough study is Timothy Kircher, Living Well in Renaissance Italy: The Virtues of Humanism and the Irony of Leon Battista Alberti (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012). See also Hans Baron, “Leon Battista Alberti as an Heir and Critic of Florentine Civic Humanism,” in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1.258–88; David Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1980), 78–99; John Najemy, “Giannozzo and His Elders: Alberti’s Critique of Renaissance Patriarchy,” in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. W. J. Connell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 51–78; and “Alberti on Love: Musings on Private Transgression and Public Discipline,” in Power, Gender, and Ritual in Europe and the Americas, ed. Peter Armande and Michael Rocke (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 135–52. In his intellectual biography, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), Anthony Grafton tries to steer a course between these two interpretive traditions. Grafton highlights Alberti’s complex personality and ambivalences. He also describes in detail the power relations and the ambiguities that pervaded the social, professional and intellectual contexts of Alberti’s activity. Still, the protagonist emerges as a true Renaissance Man who managed to transcend the chaotic situation by building new intellectual communities and creating new discourses.

5. Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano e Alberto Tenenti (Turin: Einaudi, 1969); The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); hereafter page numbers are cited in the text and refer to the English edition and to the Italian edition, respectively.

6. This interpretive direction was offered by Eugenio Garin and Hans Baron. For a coherent and succinct articulation, see William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 1–51. Many of the insights of this interpretation were reformulated in terms of the “linguistic turn” taken by the humanities, as, for example, in Nancy Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), and in Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

7. Thomas Aquinas, Political Writings, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84 (IaIIae 91 art 1 resp.).

8. Aquinas, Political Writings, 86 (IaIIae 91 art 2 resp.).

9. Aquinas, Political Writings, 118 (IaIIae 94 art 2 resp.) and 119 (IaIIae 94 art 3 resp.). Despite the clear tension between this anthropology and the Christian perception of man as fallen, an asocial creature dominated by his passions and naturally inclined to evil, Christian thinkers qua political philosophers adhered to it. They had no alternative, for rejecting it meant renouncing purposeful political activity as well as rational political thought. This is indeed the case with those theologians—notably Augustine and Luther—who extended the Christian image of man to the realm of politics. Precisely because they assumed that man was asocial and evil by nature, they argued that the political world was inherently evil and irrational. They concluded that any attempt to construct a moral political body was futile and that the powers that be—even those manifestly evil—were legitimate. See, for example, Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 147–48 (IV.4); Martin Luther, On Secular Authority in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, ed. Harro Höpfl (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991).

10. While most participants in the dialogues in Della famiglia bear the names of real members of the Alberti family, Lionardo is a fictive character and John Najemy plausibly conjectures that his name alludes to the most prominent humanist of the period, Leonardo Bruni (“Alberti on Love,” 135).

11. Lorenzo Valla, De Voluptate/On Pleasure, ed. and trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch (New York: Abaris Books, 1977); Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 158–78.

12. See Hanan Yoran, “The Humanist Critique of Metaphysics and the Foundation of the Political Order,” Utopian Studies 13 (2002): 1–19.

13. As opposed to the question of the position of Alberti himself, which is of no interest and cannot be answered within the theoretical framework of this investigation.

14. See, for example, Francis William Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 21–61; John Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 219–44.

15. This view reflects contemporary convictions. The Florentine Giovanni Rucellai, for example, wrote in 1457 that “it is said that the greatest love there is is that of the father for his son” (cited in Kent, Household, 56).

16. See George W. McClure, “The Art of Mourning: Autobiographical Writings on the Loss of a Son in Italian Humanist Thought (1400–1461),” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 440–75.

17. For humanist educational thought, see Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. and trans. Craig W. Kallendorf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

18. See Najemy, “Alberti on Love.”

19. As Najemy notes, Battista often selectively reads his classical sources and distorts their lessons (“Alberti on Love,” 140–43).

20. For a paradigmatic formulation of civic humanism’s ideology, see Leonardo Bruni, Laudatio Florentinea urbis, in Hans Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 232–63. For the English translation, see Panegyric to the City of Florence, trans. B. G. Kohl, in The Earthly Republic, ed. B. G. Kohl and R. G. Witt (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 135–75; idem, Oratio in funere Ioannis Stroze, in Susanne Daub, Leonardo Brunis Rede Auf Nanni Strozzi (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1996), 281–302. For a partial English translation, see Oration for the Funeral on Nanni Strozzi, in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, ed. Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 121–27. On civic humanism, see Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Modern Italian Renaissance, rev. ed. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), and idem, In Search of Civic Humanism.

21. “We who are not schooled in books become erudite through practice and time. ... We undoubtedly know, by virtue of experience, more than you [young learned men] with all your learning and subtleties and wily schemes [sottigliezze e regole di malizia] (204; 260). See also 161, 163, 166, 186; 199–200, 202, 207, 233.

22. See Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue, 79–80.

23. This in a nutshell is the political theory elaborated by Quentin Skinner in numerous works. For a recent formulation, see his “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives,” in Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2.186–212.

24. For an astute criticism of Skinner’s position from a similar perspective, see Ross Pool, Nation and Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 86–87.

25. On the fiercely competitive environment of the humanist community itself, see Grafton’s fascinating description in Alberti, 53–65.

26. See Bruni, Oratio.

27. See Najemy, A Histoy of Florence, 186–87.

28. See Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man, trans. M. Epstein (New York: H. Fertig, 1967), 123–24.

29. See Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

30. This is not to say that he is indifferent to his reputation. On the contrary, but he sees it not as end in itself, but rather as a means for economic success (e.g. 196–97; 249–50).