Filarete’s Libro and Memoria: The Archive within a Book

Abstract

The first illustrated manuscript on architecture was produced in the fifteenth century by a sculptor turned architect, known as Filarete (1400–1469). Written as a dialogical narrative, taking place between a patron and his architect, the treatise’s pedagogical tone unfolds as a form of storytelling about the design and construction of an ideal city. Accordingly, the architectural drawings accompanying the text hold a polysemous nature. Disegno constitutes the first step of the design process within the overall narrative, while also providing a visual demonstration of the author’s words. However, the discovery taking place in the story of an illustrated ancient codex – memoria – suggests another way to interpret the architect’s intentions. The literary maneuver of inserting a book within another book and the intertwined nature of word and image allow Filarete to use his Libro to document his accomplishments and the wonders he could build with the support of a devoted patron. Under the semblance of suggesting to his patron to construct a memoria of his buildings, Filarete curates his Libro in the form of an archive, through which, ideologically, he can leave his own name to posterity as an architect.

Keywords:

• Renaissance
• patronage
• disegno
• memoria
• antiquity
• architecture
• Filarete

Notes

1. Leopold D. Ettlinger, “The Emergence of the Italian Architect during the Fifteenth Century,” in The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 96–123.

2. Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

3. James Ackerman, “Architectural Practice in the Italian Renaissance,” JSAH 13, no. 3, (1954): 3–11.

4. Indra Kagis McEwen discusses the political context in which Vitruvius wrote his treatise, highlighting the patronage relation he had with Julius and Augustus Caesar. The tight connection of patronage with building in the ancient manner was something that inspired interest in Vitruvius, whose work had a far more celebrated afterlife during the quattrocento than during his own time. See, Indra Kagis McEwen, “Virtù-vious: Roman Architecture, Renaissance Virtue,” Cahiers des études anciennes XLVIII (2011): 255–282.

5. Regarding Sforza’s intentions with Filarete’s assignment in the construction of the Castello, see: Michele Lazzaroni and Antonio Muńoz, Filarete: Scultore e Architetto del secolo XV (Roma: W. Modes, 1908), 165–166. For the power dynamics in Filarete’s working conditions: Evelyn Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 145–169.

6. The name is adapted later on in Filarete’s career, appearing in adjective form in his dedication to Piero de’ Medici. The Greek origin of the name fits into the cultural perspective of Filarete’s historicism, which is likely an influence of his close friend, the humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481). Both Filarete and Filelfo appropriate the adjective form, while later the pseudonym takes the form of a last name. In the memoirs of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1482 he is mentioned as “maestro Antonio Philarete,” and Vasari titles his entry in the Lives (both 1550 and 1568) as “Antonio Filarete, sculptor of Florence.” See Antonio di Piero Averlino, detto il Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, edited by Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi (Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1972), 5, 1; Jonathon Powers, “The Virtù of Architectural Invention: Rhetoric, Ingegno, and Imagination in Filarete’s Libro Architettonico” (PhD diss., McGill University, Montreal, 2014), 47–52.

7. Filarete refers to his book as the Libro Architettonico in the dedication to Piero de Medici. For a discussion of the title, see Mia Reinoso Genoni, “Filarete in Word and Image: Persuasion and Invention in the Architettonico Libro” (PhD diss., New York University, New York, 2007), 8–22.

8. For a discussion on Filarete’s use of the expression, see Martin Kemp, “From ‘Mimesis’ to ‘Fantasia’: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts,” Viator 8 (1977): 347–398.

9. Genoni, “Filarete in Word and Image,” 1–63.

10. Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory, trans. Sarah Benson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 131–139.

11. Maria Beltramini, “Le illustrazioni del Trattato d’architettura di Filarete: storia, analisi e fortuna,” Annali di architettura 13 (2001): 25–52. See also, Genoni, “Filarete in Word and Image,” 140–44, 77–79, 43–56.

12. For a quantitative analysis: Powers, “The Virtù of Architectural Invention,” 104–107.

13. See Spencer’s introduction in Antonio di Piero Averlino, detto il Filarete, Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture: Being the Treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino, Known as Filarete, two volumes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), XVII–XXXVII.

14. The patron is portrayed as changing his preferences; in the beginning appreciating modern buildings, later developing an appreciation for the ancient style, and towards the end fully converting to build only in ancient style. Berthold Hub, “Filarete and the East: The Renaissance of a Prisca Architectura,” JSAH 70, no. 1 (March 2011): 7.

15. Antonio di Piero Averlino, detto il Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Manuscript, 1460–1466), folio 45v.

16. Ibid., folio 47r.

17. Ibid., folio 84r.

18. Ibid., folio 86v.

19. Ibid., folio 100v.

20. Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Early Medici as The Patrons of Art,” in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 35–57.

21. F. W. Kent, “The Making of a Renaissance Patron of the Arts,” in Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, II: A Florentine Patrician and his Palace, ed. F. W. Kent, Alessandro Perosa, Brenda Preyer, Piero Sanpaolesi, Roberto Salvini and Nicolai Rubinstein (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 13.

22. Carroll William Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447–55 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), 174.

23. Philip Foster, “Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Florence Cathedral Façade,” The Art Bulletin 13, no. 3 (1981): 495–500.

24. Beltramini, “Le illustrazioni del Trattato d’architettura di Filarete,” 30.

25. For a comprehensive analysis of the narrative structure of Filarete’s Libro, see: Marina Della Putta Johnston, “The Literary Cornice of Architecture in Filarete’s Libro Architettonico,” Arte Lombarda, Nuova serie 155, no. 1 (2009): 12–22.

26. Jonathan Foote, “Well-Tempered Building: Michelangelo’s full-scale template drawings at San Lorenzo” (PhD diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Alexandria, VA, 2007), 40.

27. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 177r. For a further study of this interpretation see, Paul Emmons, Drawing Imagining Building: Embodiment in Architectural Design Practices (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 32–33. For a general discussion on the role of metonymy in architectural representation, Marco Frascari, “A New Corporeality of Architecture,”JAE 40, no. 2 (1987): 22–23.

28. Hub, “Filarete and the East,” 20–1.

29. Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Patronage in the Renaissance: An Explanatory Approach,” in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3–26.

30. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 105r. Spencer’s translation: Antonio di Piero Averlino, detto il Filarete, Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, 184.

31. Karl Galinsky, editor, Memoria Romana: Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2014), 10, 1–13.

32. Andrew Laird, “The Rhetoric of Roman Historiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Roman Historians, edited by Andrew Feldherr (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 209–210.

33. Galinsky, Memoria Romana, 2.

34. Tom Nesmith, “Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives,” The American Archivist 65, no. 1 (2002): 24–41.

35. Helen Freshwater, “The Allure of the Archive,” Poetics Today 24, no. 4 (2003): 733.

36. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 7.

37. Quoted from Leonard Barkan, “The Classical Undead: Renaissance and Antiquity Face to Face,” RES 34 (1998): 14.

38. On the education of an architect: Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 113v–114r.

39. Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 17.

40. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 104v.

41. Ibid., folio 107v.

42. See Robert Glass’s dissertation regarding Filarete’s intention to limit the treatise to architecture. Robert Glass, “Filarete at the Papal Court: Sculpture, Ceremony, and the Antique in early Renaissance Rome” (PhD diss., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 2011), 259–303.

43. Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 156.

44. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 6r.

45. Ibid.

46. A tentative suggestion based on Vitruvius’s expression for the ‘birth’ of architecture, from building practice (female) and planning (male) is made by Berthold Hub, Filarete: Der Architekt der Renaissance als Demiurg und Pädagoge (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2020), 95.

47. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 7v.

48. Francesco Barbaro, The Wealth of Wives: A Fifteenth-Century Marriage Manual, ed. and trans. by Margaret L. King (Toronto, ON: Iter Press, 2015), 38, 79; Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence. I Libri Della Famiglia, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 50–51.

49. Berthold Hub, “Founding an Ideal City in Filarete’s Libro Architettonico (c.1460),” in Foundation, Dedication and Consecration in Early Modern Europe, edited by Maarten Delbeke and Minou Schraven (Boston, MA: Brill, 2012), 17–57.

50. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 25v.

51. Filarete’s metaphor is often referred to in scholarship on patronage. See, Jill Burke, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2004), 7.

52. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 6r.

53. Ibid., folio 6v.

54. McEwen, “Virtù-vious: Roman Architecture, Renaissance Virtue,” para 5.

55. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 7r. Spencer’s translation; Antonio di Piero Averlino, detto il Filarete, Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, 14. My interpretation in brackets.

56. Filarete, Libro architettonico. Codex Magliabechianus, folio 11v.

57. Ibid., fol 123r.

58. Richard Schofield, “Avoiding Rome: An Introduction to Lombard Sculptors and the Antique,” Arte Lombarda, 100 (1992): 34–38.

59. Beltramini, “Le illustrazioni del Trattato d’architettura di Filarete,” 25–52.

60. Federica Goffi, “Translations and Dislocations of Architectural Media at the Fabric of St Peter’s, the Vatican,” ARQ 22, no. 4 (2018): 328.

61. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors & Architects, 10 volumes, trans. by Gaston Du C. De Vere (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1912–14), volume 3, 5.

62. Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Berrin Terim

Berrin Terim is a full-time lecturer at Clemson University, where she teaches history, theory, and design studios. She is a PhD candidate in Architecture and Design Research at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, expecting to graduate in May 2021. Her research centers on the role of metonymy in architectural representation. Her dissertation focuses on the Renaissance architect Filarete and his many-folded interpretation of anthropomorphism within the patronage context. Terim has published “Reading Filarete from the Margin,” in The Center as Margin: Eccentric Perspectives on Art (Vernon Press 2018), and “Dreaming the Body: Filarete’s Disegno,” in Ceilings and Dreams: The Architecture of Levity (Routledge 2019).