 Today, we're going to talk about the other superstar of the 1400s in Italy, Leon Battista Alberti. The period of the 1400s, by the way, goes by the word quattrocento, which means 1400s. And in discussions about the history of architecture and the history of art, particularly when you're discussing Italy, it's convenient to speak about the quattrocento, meaning the 1400s, the cinquecento, meaning the 1500s, the sei-cento, meaning the 1600s, and so forth, because really, conveniently, styles seem to break at the 100-year mark, and significant changes happen. We saw, for example, at the beginning of the quattrocento, important things like the bronze door of competitions were ushering in a new spatial sensibility of the Renaissance, and this new interest in antique form, antique architecture, and a humanist interest in the human body. Alberti is the other big superstar of the quattrocento, and of course, the first big superstar is Brunelleschi, whose work we looked at before. We saw his dome, for example, and we saw a number of his churches. There's one point where Brunelleschi and Alberti come into direct relationship with each other, and that is on the whole problem of mathematicizing perspective, understanding how perspective works, not just in a generalized way to get a kind of vague look of what things in the world look like, but in a specific way, to say, this is the mathematics that allows me to take the thing that I'm seeing and plot it on paper. And the drawing we see here is the proof that Brunelleschi performed when he wanted to show the citizens of Florence that this really worked. He used his method of what he called legitimate construction, constructione legittima, to draw and to paint the little baptistry of San Giovanni over here, and had this elaborate method of having a mirrored sky to reflect the real sky, a peephole and a mirror, so that you would have this illusion that you were actually looking at the real thing. And so Brunelleschi's method was great, but Brunelleschi's method was really just transferred orally to his friends. There was no publication, let's say. There was no formula even that had been written down and could be widely transferred. So for a while there, the whole idea of perspective resided solely in Florence. Construzione legittima of Brunelleschi, which is really not so different from the method used nowadays if you want to construct a perspective. The Trinità by Masaccio is an example of one of the friends of Brunelleschi to whom he explained this method. And here in this painting in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, you see it being used to effective ends. And a thing that I think is really interesting about the Trinity painting is that it's not simply using perspective, but it's also using Roman architecture. This is a barrel vault with coffering. It's got these classical, I think, Ionic column capitals here. There's an attempt to get it right, but if you look at the proportions that Masaccio is using on his little barrel vaulted arch, they're pretty slender. His sensibility is really close to the sensibility that we saw Brunelleschi using in projects like the Ospedale, the orphanage project, where there's an attempt to recover and reclaim for contemporary use elements from ancient architecture, but the sensibility is still too slender, too gothic, too spindly. Even the method of putting together this arcade at the orphanage is a kind of gothic or, let's say, Romanesque idea. In antiquity, you would not have a running course of arches over columns. You would have them over piers. But here, he favors this more delicate sensibility, and you see that kind of delicacy here, too. The proportions are all wrong in the width to height ratio of the columns. And again and again, we see in Brunelleschi this attempt to recover a classicizing language, but a tendency to do so while adhering to gothic ideas about how to build, and even ideas about proportions and about rib structures versus wall and surface structures. So here in the Ospedale, we see an articulation of ribs being received by little brackets, which is not a Roman technique, but a medieval technique. And here in the Church of San Lorenzo, Brunelleschi is able to be more thorough going in his idea about the plan. In what way does this plan represent a kind of renaissance sensibility? All we see right now is no facade at all and a plan. But the plan tells us something about a renaissance sensibility, and what is that? Yes, sir? It's all based on a square module. Well, who cares about squares? How do they care about squares? Did you say because of Plato? Well, that's OK then. Because of Plato, because geometry confers a kind of legitimacy on things. It's a truth. It's a divine truth. It's a microcosmic reflection of divine order. And so to organize a church based on this really great module of the square means that you're automatically conferring a kind of meaning to your church that goes beyond your taste and goes beyond the particular project at hand, but connects to what people in the renaissance would have thought were absolute truths, truths of the universe. And it's not just the square that he's using, but it's also the ratios among the squares. He's putting together a proportional system. It's not just squares popping out all over, but it's a method of composing the squares that's driven by an attempt to get a kind of arithmetic proportion going throughout. And why would we care about proportion? Who cares about proportion? Why is that important in the renaissance? Yes, proportion is sort of a direct contemplation of God, or proportion is also a kind of microcosmic reflection of divine order. There's this whole concept of the harmony of the spheres. The distance between planetary orbs and the lengths of strings used to make a harmony, and the spatial lengths used to proportion a room, are all interrelated and all revelatory of something that really transcends subjective taste, or at least so people thought. So when we look at the Church of San Lorenzo here, you can see that there is a thoroughgoing attempt to lock everything into this proportional system. And here, too, we see a couple of issues that characterize Brunelleschi's way of working. One, this desire to articulate really, really clearly. And what do I mean by articulation? What does articulation mean? Okay, there are arches there, but how are they articulated? It's one thing to say there are arches, and the... Sorry? Okay, there's slender. Who would like to add to that? Yes? It's mirrored in the back. Okay, how is that articulating it? Okay, we can see arches clarifying the dimension of the column in the arch part. I guess what I'm saying, articulation, I'll give you an example using speech, because you've probably heard people say, that's an articulate person, or that's not an articulate person. So this is going to be an example of being not articulate. Be an articulate for me, Justin. Uh... Eh... Justin's example of being an articulate, which was eh... means we don't understand what's going on, because he's not clarifying. He's not being specific about what he's talking about. So I would say that Brunelleschi here is using the orders to call out the proportional system really, really clearly. You see the space between these two columns. Well, that's a bay. That's giving me my square module. And if I want to understand how the square module completes itself, I have pilasters on the far wall here that call out the square module. Now, these columns are structural. They're holding up the stuff above them. But these things are simply there to call out the square module. So Brunelleschi has this technique of using the grayish stone, the Pietro Serena, to call out the articulation of the geometrical figures that are embedded in his architecture. And he does it in such a way here in San Lorenzo that not only is the wall articulated, but he transfers those measures to the paving of the floor. So you look at this thing and you can really read the geometry of the space. He's going out of his way to clarify the dimensions of each part and to clarify the relationship of parts to the whole. So Brunelleschi loves this idea of the square module. And we see it again here in Santo Spirito. And we see here the little pazzi chapel that we looked at before, where again he's making a huge effort to articulate the parts and to articulate and make clear the relationships of parts to the whole, not simply by using these flattened pilasters to parse out the space, but by really making it three-dimensional with the paving and with the kinds of elements that happen up above in the vault. I use the word pilaster. I don't know if I've ever defined it. Does anybody know what a pilaster is? It's exactly right. These are the flat column things here. The Romans use them. The Greeks absolutely didn't use them, because the Greeks were all about a traviated structure. But when you're doing a wall architecture and you want to still have the kind of rhythm that you would get from a columnar structure, or you want to simply break down the whole into interrelated parts, pilasters come in pretty handy. So they are like the orders. They have column capital, but flattened ones that respond to the orders in the three-dimensional sense. So pilasters everywhere. There's even a kind of flattened coffering up here that calls out the module so that you see it everywhere. Another thing we looked at when we looked at Brunelleschi was that he was interested in classicism, interested in antiquity, so much so that he went off to the Roman fora and spent a good deal of time there sketching and studying. But when he came back trying to actually deploy these lessons he learned from antiquity, he was not a slave to antique types. He really wildly reconfigured things, so much so that it's possible to look at something like the facade of the Pazzi Chapel and see it as a kind of reimagined triumphal arch. But a triumphal arch wholly lacking the massiveness and the gravity of a real triumphal arch. And again, reprising this delicate gothicized sensibility. Let's talk about Alberti, because Alberti's a little bit younger than Brunelleschi. And Alberti has a very, very different background. As we said when we talked about Brunelleschi, he was a member of the silk guild, but that involved the goldsmiths and the people who cast metals. So he was sort of a sculptor, man who worked with his hands, a man who liked to make things, a practical man, a engineer really, a tinkerer. And Alberti comes from a very, very different background. He's a man of theory. Alberti was educated at the university in Bologna, the oldest university in the world, and got a degree in 1428. He was the illegitimate child of a Florentine patrician and lived most of his life in exile up north in Genoa. And he took holy orders, as so many people did, in 1432, and served as a papal legate. So he would often have commissions to represent the interests of the pope in various towns. So he was well-traveled, well-read, and incredibly theoretical. I might add, well-dressed. Look at that little outfit. It's a nicely-dressed man. Alberti wrote a lot, and he wrote widely. You've probably heard the term renaissance man. Oh, he's a real renaissance man. He can wallpaper and make waffles. He's amazing. But Alberti was a renaissance man. Just look at the subjects that his treatises cover. An early treatise is de pictura on painting. And here, he looks at Brunelleschi's method of legitimate construction, mathematical construction of perspective, and codifies it, simplifies it, writes it down, and publishes it, along with a theoretical discussion of what it is to represent pictorial space. He wrote about the family. He wrote a description of urban Rome. He wrote an Italian grammar. He wrote books on cryptography, agriculture, the duties of a bishop. He wrote plays, moral and ethical treatises. He wrote a little satire. And the one that's probably most important for us, he wrote De Re Edificatoria, which are the 10 books of architecture, not the one books, which he wrote in 1452. So he's thought about a lot of topics. He's written about a lot of topics. And he's an interesting man. So this is the frontispiece of his la pictura and various techniques of the construction. This is the 10 books of architecture as available from the Dover reprint company, well worth having, because Alberti is a scholar. Alberti is a master of the Latin language. He is eloquent. He is articulate. He's studious. And it turns out Vitruvius was a dope, at least according to Alberti. Vitruvius could barely speak Latin. Vitruvius seems to have been, at least in Alberti's depiction of him, probably a man of the crafts who was not particularly literate, but who compiled together these snippets of antique thought about architecture. And so his book is valuable, because it's all we have about the ancients theorize their world and their architectural projects. But Alberti could write well. So Alberti begins his 10 books on architecture by saying, Vitruvius is so illiterate. When you read the book, you have no idea if he's writing in Latin or in Greek. If you're a native Greek speaker, you're sure he's writing in Latin because you can't understand him. And if you're a native Latin speaker, you're sure he's writing in Greek because you can't understand him either. One of the projects in writing his 10 books on architecture is to read Vitruvius and to figure out what this mush is all about, and then to make a kind of coherent project to explain architectural theory in his 10 books. I mentioned that Alberti was a Renaissance man, humanist, linguist, philosopher, classical thinker. But probably the thing that has impressed me the most of all of his accomplishments is the fact that it is said that he could jump over a horse. So put all those other accomplishments together with the idea of standing, not even with a running start, and jumping over a horse. That is a guy who can do almost anything. Alberti, in theorizing the world of visual things and built things, has a theory of beauty. And he suggests that beauty is proportion. And the numbers and proportions, which our ancestors have given us, give proportion authority. So you use the authority of the ancients to know that you're doing something beautiful. Beauty is perceived intuitively, and that's a kind of neoplatonic idea. There's nothing rational about beauty. When you see beauty, you know it because it's a glimpse of God. And you can also see beauty in nature. And that's quite an extraordinary thing to say, that nature is not this field of delusions, but rather a place where beauty and truth can be sought out. A lot of the things that we saw Vitruvius talking about, Alberti goes back to, he talks about decorum, the notion that an architect must be able to judge what is appropriate. And so there are different building programs like a townhouse or a country house. And he would say, if you're building a townhouse for a noble person, you would want to have gravitas, a seriousness of purpose. But if you're building a country house for the very same client, you would want to have festivitas or a kind of more frivolous, more light-hearted engagement with the subject matter, because the country calls for one kind of response and the city calls for another. There are two types of beauty. One is characterized by venustas and the other by dignitas. Venustas is feminine, dignitas is masculine. And you might say, if you were doing the townhouse and you wanted to have gravitas, the seriousness of purpose, you might go for dignitas. And if you're doing the country house where you want to have this more light-hearted quality, you might go for venustas. And the architect has to have sound judgment and know what is appropriate. This whole business of proportion that Alberti extols in his treatise and tries to deploy in his work has a number of different constellations. And if you read the Wittkauer text, Wittkauer is very thorough about explaining how these proportioning systems work and how they transform from the Quatrocento into the Cinquecento, into the work in the 1500s. Essentially, there are three different kinds of proportional means. And a mean is a relationship between extremes. For example, in a arithmetic mean, which is the easiest thing, you have three terms, A, B, C, and A minus B equals C minus B. So these are little things out of Wittkauer. Two minus one equals three minus two. It's one on both sides. And essentially that's just a really complex way of saying the arithmetic mean is modular. The arithmetic mean has to do with a simple addition of like units. So when we saw something like the Brunelleschi churches, the San Lorenzo, the Santo Spirito, those are organized by the arithmetic mean. The geometric mean gets to be trickier. And again, you have your three terms, A, B, C, and the mean is the relationship of the extremes. A proportioning system that relates three terms so that the relationship of the middle term to the extremes is A is to B as B is to C. Four is to six equals two thirds. Six is to nine equals two thirds. So that is a arithmetic mean. It's not as straightforward as a simple adding of modules. The most complex method of proportioning embraced by Renaissance theory is the harmonic mean. It's the most complex mathematically but probably the most potent because the harmonic mean is the one that gives you the truest ability to mirror the harmony of the spheres, the divine order that organizes the cosmos, organizes music, and organizes beauty. So it's a proportioning system that relates three terms so that the relationship of the middle term to the extremes is the quantity B minus A over A equals the quantity C minus B over C as in six to eight to 12. Got it? Work it out. Read the Vidcalla. And here again is that image of the harmony of the spheres that we talked about before which reinforces the notion that proportion is not simply there to make things look good but that proportion confers meaning. Proportion is revelatory of divine order and the more you can embody those kinds of relationships microcosmically in a design project on earth the more potent the meaning will be. In the 10 books on architecture, Alberti goes on and on and on about ideal churches, the design for the ideal church, and he has a pretty great idea about what that would be, the circle. Go for it. The circle is the best possible form for a number of reasons. It's preferred by nature. And he goes through these kind of strange ideas about things that are perfect in nature and circular. Like you cut a tree and you cut through the trunk of a tree. What do you get? You get a circle. Perfect. You look up the moon. What do you get? You get a circle. So everywhere you look in nature, you get a circle. The circle also has this neoplatonic connection to the figure of the cosmos. It's mathematically describable and you find it in nature. And so he lists nine geometrical figures that would be good church plan types. Of course, the circle being the best but all of these figures are determined by the circle. So there are things like the hexagon or the octagon or ratios of the circle. There are developments from the square and he also cites antique precedent. The circle is not simply something you find in nature. It's not simply something you find in mathematics but you also have these Roman examples, things like the pantheon. And he uses some early Christian examples like Santo Stefano Rotondo and Santa Costanza. And this is Alberti really elaborating on the theories performed by Vitruvius because Vitruvius doesn't mention centralized plans. Vitruvius is much, much more interested in the nuts and bolts assemblage of snippets rather than a comprehensive vision of architecture. And Alberti, because he's so interested in centralized plans, does not recommend basilicas. He thinks that the temple is the seat of divine justice and the basilica is the seat of human justice. So if you have a basilican plan, you're breaching decorum in his mind. The decorum would say you have a holy building type for holy activities and a civic building type like a basilica for civic activities. And this is quite, quite different than everything that had been done from the fall of Rome to the time of Alberti because the basilica, the longitudinal Latin cross plan had become the dominant church plan because it was so well equipped to accommodate the kinds of processions, the relationship between the clergy and the congregation, and so forth. So in spite of the fact that Alberti does not recommend basilicas, he's gonna be building basilicas because everybody wants basilicas. It's the kind of church that works. This notion of the ideal centralized church is a ideal dream that pervades the thinking of Renaissance thinkers and even thinkers into the Seicento, into the Baroque period. You wanna have it, but it doesn't work. It doesn't accommodate the program very well. And we'll see more about how it doesn't work later on. These descriptions of beauty, I think, are really great. Use these to evaluate your own studio design projects. Beauty is something so that nothing can be added or taken away without destroying the harmony of the whole. So look at what you've done and think about can you take anything away? If you took it away, would it be better? Would it fall apart? If you added something, would it be better? Would it fall apart? You should try to get that kind of elegant fit. That is what he would say. And then specific proportions. Let's look at some of these projects by Alberti. One of his early projects is building a façade for the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, the family church of the Ruccelli family, in case you wondered. And you look at this thing and you might be inclined to say, this is a Renaissance church, you've gotta be kidding. Thank God Brunelleschi didn't build any facades because this doesn't look particularly Renaissance. And in fact, if you look at the plan of the church, it's a Gothic church that he had to put a façade on. And here's the interior to show you that it is a Gothic church in the style of Tuscan Gothic which is to say polychromatic striped marble, kind of punchy windows, not the great dematerialization that you have up north, but it's a good example of a Gothic church nonetheless. So in what sense is Alberti making a Renaissance façade? Just not too far away on a hill overlooking Florence, you have this church, which is a Romanesque church, San Minato al Monte. If you look at these two churches and you look at them fast, you might say, well, these are exactly the same. Alberti has not really done much to extend the vocabulary or the typology or the form of this Romanesque church. So how is it, how does it work? Why is it different or is it the same? Does anybody have a read on this? Yes, sir. I think that's a good point. He's inscribed circles. We see a circle here, we see a circle here, we see a circle here. So there are large geometrical figures that begin to organize the whole, whereas you might say the façade of San Minato al Monte is more piecemeal. Things are happening more as surface pattern than as figures that organize the whole. What else? Yes, they're awfully similar. I gotta say that they're awfully similar and the things that separate them are fairly subtle. And one reason that they're similar is that they have the same vocabulary. If we use this linguistic metaphor to talk about architecture, the vocabulary could be things like polychromatic marble or things like round-headed arches or things like engaged curmythian columns. Vocabulary could even be things like little temple floating on top, which is happening in both cases. But they have a different syntax. And syntax is a word used in linguistics to talk about how you put pieces of words together. Syntactically, good sentence would be the dog is red. And a syntactically bad sentence would be red dog is the. You know, the vocabulary is exactly the same, but the method of putting the pieces together is different and the meaning becomes less clear. So when you look at the alberti, there's an attempt to find these organizational strategies that have a precedence. Like, look at just the temple part up here in the alberti and up here in San Miniatto. Can anybody see a difference between them? Yes. You get that? Yeah, absolutely right. If you look at the little temple piece here, it's way more classical than the little temple piece in San Miniatto. The alberti, for example, has a fairly hefty entablature and a nicely delineated shadow casting pediment and the relationship of the stripy pilasters to the entablature is logical. It's what you would expect. It represents the movement of tectonic forces. Over here, the pediment becomes completely kind of overwhelmed by these miniaturizations of running colonnade as decorative pattern. And even the idea of what supports the pediment isn't so clear. They're more like panels than like columns. So there's a classicizing impulse going on in alberti. But he has the same problem that the people in the Milan Cathedral had, which is to say, he believes that the parts and the whole have to agree. So he's got this gothic church. He's got a gothic church that he has to deal with. So it would not be appropriate, given the gothic church, to just slam on some perfect Roman facade. He's got to negotiate. One way he negotiates is to find a way to take the vocabulary of the Romanesque church and to throw Roman syntax into it to create a more kind of thoroughgoing organization. So we found a temple here. Can we find anything else that looks kind of Roman? Yes. Excellent triumphal art. If you look at the bottom part of this, he's making a triumphal arch. He's got the big entablature here. He's got these large scale engaged columns holding it up. And he's got this kind of trinity of little arches there. Alberti also has another problem that he's dealing with. And that is the fact that part of this thing already had a gothic facade. So he has a difficult problem of taking the existing gothic work and incorporating that into his conception. So if you look over here at the lowest story, the facade was built right about up to here when Alberti got the project. And there are these gothic pointy things down here. Alberti uses the triumphal arch as a strategy to create thickness to the wall so that there can be one layer. And that's the outermost layer of the triumphal arch of colossal scaled plasters to allow this new work to create a kind of screen so that the gothic work sits behind that screen and doesn't take a prominent reading. That's not the only thing that's going on. Alberti has also got the same love of clear geometry that Brunelleschi does, this kind of desire to encode geometry and proportions into the building. So in the case of Santamaria Novella, he's running with a square. And there are all kinds of different ways that you can begin to look at this thing. The whole of the church is a square or could be inscribed in a square. The temple could be inscribed in a square. The lower story is a two square and so forth. So he is taking something that in its Romanesque form is really a kind of additive collection of pieces. And he's marshaling geometry to hold it together. And he's using this language of the Tuscan vernacular that we see here in the Baptistry. And here in the Baptistry, we see the same kind of syntax that we saw in San Miniatto Almonte. That is to say, not so much of a strong interest in representing the tectonics of the building. This thing is a bunch of decorative panels rather than an entablature. And we come over to the Alberti façade and we really see something that looks very closely drawn from antiquity. Here we have our temple and here we have our triumphal arch. And they're both kind of bad at being temples and triumphal arches. But Alberti is juggling a lot of balls. He's negotiating a lot of conditions. This is the San Miniatto temple and the Alberti temple. And here's a real temple. And the real temple is the temple of Fortuna virilis in Rome, a little temple that they all knew very well. And just look at the plasticity of the pediment here and the gutsiness of the entablature here at Fortuna virilis. And you can see that Alberti is going for this Romanness and not for the thinness of a Romanesque model or even let's say for the thinness of a Brunelleschian conception of what classical architecture is. Ditto here we have silly looking, flattened out, triumphal arch and the arch of Sedamus Severus, one of the triumphal arches in the Roman Forum. And the ideas of the colossal order, big arch, little arches are all being drawn from here. He's also trying to figure out how to solve the question of the Basilican section but still make a unified thing. He introduces this motif of the scroll, this kind of curly Q scroll to connect them together. And it's a classical element also. We know of the volume, the curly Q thing that we have on the Ionic column capital and he sort of unrolls an Ionic column capital to connect the temple piece to the triumphal arch piece. And this is just a highly elaborated study of proportions and it basically comes down to the fact that it's a square. There's a square module being broken down and being used in many, many ways to organize this. So Alberti I think solves the problem of dealing with an agreement between a gothic interior and a classical desire in a way that's pretty subtle and pretty clever. But if you were to look at the church you would have to say it doesn't look so classical. It pretty much looks still like a fairly thin facade. And Alberti is gonna try throughout his career to find ways to bring Romaness into architecture, to bring the plasticity and the muscularity of Roman architecture into his work. And I think he succeeds better at this church, San Francesco in Rimini. It's also called the Tempio Malatestiana because it was done for this man, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, also known as the Wolf of Rimini. So you know this guy was probably great, great company. He was one of a class of people that ruled these little towns scattered throughout Italy called the Condottiere. And the Condottiere was basically a Italian word for savage warlord. So you had these odd combinations of tastes in someone like Sigismondo Malatesta and there were a lot of these people also. Part of the time he would raid and plunder and murder and part of the time he would sponsor the arts. He's interesting in the same way the Medici are interesting because if you're a warlord you have new money, not old money. And if you have new money, you're willing to take a risk on new art. The old artistic styles represented the old entrenched wealth and the entrenched monarchy. Savage warlord, happy to get Alberti to come in. And so he commissioned Alberti to renovate a church in his hometown of Rimini. And the church, poor old Alberti, hates the idea of the Basilica, very disgusted with Gothic things. It's another Gothic church and he has to renovate it. And here the project is more thoroughgoing. It is to really not simply give it a facade but to wrap the church in a new kind of envelope and to insert a dome, a pantheonic dome into the church. And it didn't quite get finished. Malatesta wanted to have this be the final resting place for himself and his beloved mistress. Malatesta had a wife, but she was not coming into this church. She could be buried somewhere else. But this was to be for Malatesta and his mistress. And the minute Malatesta died, work stopped on this because savage warlords don't have that many friends that want to keep their legacy going. But look at this. Just compare it even to Sant'Ambria novella. It's a pretty great looking church. You can see evidence of the archeological investigations of walking around the Roman Forum, looking at this stuff, trying to recover the lessons of antiquity. In Alberti, I think in a way that's a lot more direct than what you get by looking at Brunelleschi. Plasticity, thickness and depth of the wall. You really see here. But again, he's got the same problem. The problem is agreement of parts to the whole. You cannot lie. You cannot simply slap a Renaissance facade on a Gothic building. You have to somehow find a way of reconciling the two, or you break one of these principles, the principle of Konkin-Kitas, agreement of parts to the whole. And so he does this really by this thick, thick wall. You can see the depth of the wall along the sides. You can also see the depth of the wall along the portal. So there's this thick Renaissance wall. And it's carved away to reveal a kind of Gothic surface behind it. So there's this kind of incredibly clever double play. And if you look at this facade, how would you describe the Roman type, or types that he's using to try to organize it? What typology do you see at play? Did I hear a triumphal arch? Because it's sort of a big triumphal arch. And it's also sort of a temple. So the same game that he was playing at Santabria Novella of using these two classical types and working them together is going on here, too. Here's a triumphal arch. Once again, this is the arch of Constantine. And this triumphal arch, interestingly enough, is a Roman triumphal arch in the town of Rimini, not so very far, like half a kilometer away from where the church actually is located. And I think the fact that this triumphal arch has a pediment begins to authorize part of the project that he has here of putting a big old pediment on. But what I love about the Tempio Maletestiano, and let me say it's my favorite Alberti church, is the thickness of the wall. This is, I think, more Roman than simply playing with proportions, but playing with the ability of a building to begin to reveal its qualities in strong southern light. Here's the Basilica of Constantine and Maxentius in Rome, these huge arches. And it's as if he's looking at that example in defining the side elevation of the Tempio Maletestiano. This is the moment where the Roman wrapper carves away at the portal and reveals this Gothic stuff. And here is a drawing analyzing the proportions. And once again, Alberti is using geometry as a way of reining it all in. We have these given conditions of the Gothic church. He corrects the proportions by the thickened wrapper, and everything is locked into this kind of play of the square. This notion of wrapping a building in ruins is a great idea. And it's an idea that Louis Kahn plays with in a number of his projects. This is a project by Louis Kahn in Dhaka, where he quite deliberately describes this as taking a building and wrapping the building in ruins to provide this play of shade and light and complexity. And it is what Alberti is doing here at San Francisco, the Tempio Maletestiano. Here's a plan of what it looks like now. You can see here at the edge this thickened wrapper. And he was clever, because he used this thickened wrapper to clear out all the sarcophagi and tombs of cardinals and bishops and everything that had been collected there, because he needed a lot of space for tombs for his mistress and himself eventually. And he places them inside these little arches along the outside. And they become nice places for that. In his original conception of the building, there would have been this dome. This is a metal that was struck to show you the elevation of what he was hoping to have. And had that dome been placed there, it would have been really one of the most extraordinary domes built during the Renaissance. One of the most ambitious and extraordinary domes didn't get built. Tragedy. And this is what you see when you walk along the side of the church. You see these Gothic windows sheltered by this thick, thick Roman arch with a little dead cardinal in between. So Alberti's most famous church, and probably his most perfect church, or the one that most perfectly reflects a thorough development of interior and exterior space, is the Church of San Andrea in Mantua. This is also a work on an existing foundation, but he was able to reconfigure more than just the elevations here. And if you look at the facade, you're probably willing now to say, you know exactly what's going on. You have what? What typologies are being deployed here? Exactly right, the temple and the triumphal arch, perfectly superimposed now. Not stacked, not alluded to, but temple and triumphal arch. And what's great about the temple and the triumphal arch is that the thing operates at multiple scales. The triumphal arch has, as its very nature, this ability to operate at two scales. You have the large scale that relates to the entablature, and you have the small scale that relates to the arch. So here we have it stuck in the city of Mantua. A little plaza here, Mantua is a great city, by the way, with a series of really wonderful public spaces that go back here to the Ducal Palace. And also notice, and this is a condition that you see a lot in Europe, how this church is really embedded in the city. It's not a freestanding object. In this case, it's not even as freestanding as the Tempeo Malatestiano, where at least you had a side elevation. There are like shoe stores and ice cream shops stuck against the side of the building, and it only reveals itself to you here by the front entry and here by one of the transeps. We admired in the Tempeo Malatestiano this notion of thickness and depth that the wall was becoming increasingly muscular, increasingly beefy, increasingly Roman, increasingly available to the play of light and shadow on surface. And if you look at the plan of the building, you can see that the whole edge is conceived of as this kind of carved surface, kind of amazing of all these little chapels and things. By the way, they have a very good relic in this church. They have Jesus's blood, if you ever want to see Jesus's blood. I was there, yes, I was once there on Good Friday, and they don't usually bring out Jesus's blood, but they sometimes do, and on Good Friday they do. And I just happened to have been there on Good Friday, and it was an amazing experience, because the church is vast, and it was people pushed together to participate in this ceremony to see this very important relic brought out. But if you look at the proportions, you can see the square, the square, the square, all of these things going on here. But you can also see an interesting strategy about the triumphal arch as a way of making things work not only on the exterior, but also on the interior. I don't know how well you can read this axonometric drawing, but what it shows you is that this irregular rhythm of chapels on the side is actually a running course of triumphal arches. So he takes this notion of agreement of interior and exterior so far that he uses the motif of the exterior of little guy, big guy, little guy, with big arch in the middle, to organize the side walls of the church. And it's funny, because if you look at the church, there's something that I think is distinctly odd, and that is the facade doesn't fit the church. Here's the facade, and it's this little shrunken guy, and here's the church back here. So if he's going for this big agreement of parts to the whole, it would have been a good idea to get a facade that fits the church and doesn't lie about the dimensions of the church. But he has to lie. Here's the rest of the church, by the way, right over here. And one reason he has to lie is he's going for the proportions of the whole, and he wants to have the proportions of the exterior facade come measure it with the proportions of the interior running triumphal arch band. And so by shrinking it down a little bit, he's able to make the measure on the front facade revelatory of the measure on the side facades. There are all kinds of clever things going on. Also, the church has a rose window, because remember, Alberti is dealing with an existing fabric. He's restructuring it, but the priests don't want the rose window knocked down. So where are you going to put the rose window? It's a big problem. Here it is. He built this little house, this little hut on the roof, that shelters the rose window. And that's kind of funny. He certainly doesn't want a rose window slamming through the building. He had to deal with that at Santa Maria Novella, and it made it hard to get everything to work, because it was such a powerful figure. So here it's up high. This thing is just sitting quite low against the volume of the church. And if you look at it, it almost looks like a section through the pantheon. If you look at the little covering that he put to disguise the rose window. So there's a strong interest in collecting together and recombining different elements from classical antiquity in playful new ways. This is the space of the entryway. And again, that little facade is not paper thin, like in Santa Maria Novella. It's got depth. It's got real spatial qualities. And it's the three dimensionalization of the barrel vault, the little rounded bay, cutting through the larger rounded bay. And when we enter the church, we find the same strategy going on in here. This is the little piece of the nave wall of running course of triumphal arches that you can see over here. Fabulous. One more thing about this that I think is kind of interesting is that we began by saying that Brunelleschi talked to Masaccio about perspective. And everybody in Florence was talking about recovering the language of classical antiquity. How can we do it? What's possible? And Masaccio paints this painting of the trinity, of the barrel vault with the large order as if it's an element within a triumphal arch. And when Alberti builds his church, and you can't see it very well here, he more or less rebuilds the image painted by Masaccio. So there's this interesting back and forth game between the arts, between art and architecture, art and architecture. Every conquest in pictorial space made by the painters comes back and is adopted and incorporated into the architectural designs. Things get more complex and more interesting really fast. There's one more little church in Mantua by Alberti, but I'm just showing you that it's also got good proportions and that relates to antiquity, but it's not as important as the other ones. So next time, we will talk about other things.