Art Director, Graphic design, Multimedia

Paesaggio Urbano | Urban Design # 2.2011

In the second part of his 1860 work entitled The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt’s talks about “the state as work of art” and he proposes an understanding of Alberti which, although written a long time ago, is
still very insightful. The Swiss scholar saw Leon Battista Alberti as a vastly “proud man”, a “universal man” and a personage blessed with “many aptitudes” and “astounding versatility”.
A full-fledged humanist, author, mathematician, art theorist, architectural scholar and acute observer of the events of his day, Leon Battista Alberti was also a thoroughly modern man. It is not for nothing that in the late 1400s Cristoforo Landino, applying the metaphor of a chameleon, captured with this the brilliant image of highly peculiar nature of Alberti: the mimicry, the experimentalism and the seemingly ceaseless variety of linguistic, stylistic and thematic registers he was capable of. Still, if this “variety” is the “mark” of the 1400s, this “variety” together with experimentalism – but above all the idea that the “bonae artes” are in the “medietas” – it is certainly a “mark” of our times as well. These considerations gave birth, in 1998 in Mantua, to a Study Centre dedicated to Alberti. There is, however, another very valid reason for having named the Mantua Centre after Alberti. The metaphor most frequently used by Humanists to express their concept of art and imitation is the ancient one about the bee. This metaphor, however, explains only some of the many phases that make up the process. It tells us that each work comes from a previous work, each new text is based on another text, and that works that are made use of are like so much pollen that, in the end, becomes honey – a different and better product. Alberti, apart from the honey metaphor,
uses and elaborates on the mosaic metaphor. The honey metaphor is limited, in and of itself, and although it includes the transformation process, it says nothing of how such
a process develops, while the mosaic metaphor explains, to a high degree, the mechanism of its own creation. Alberti maintains that the culture of the past is like a temple and that it is the duty of the modern intellectual to break that temple down into pieces. The transformation of the building blocks of the past into “tiles” is, therefore, the first step in the construction of a new building. The second step consists of selection: in choosing the materials that can actually be reused to build a new temple, and the third step is that of applying the tiles to the base of a preordained “concept” and “design”. This is the context in which the collaboration between the Leon Battista Alberti Study Centre Foundation and the DIAPReM Centre of Ferrara came about. In fact, after having ascertained that the Albertian buildings, for however much they had been carefully studied, had been built using surveys that had been processed using various methods that, in some cases, were actually approximations, it was decided to proceed with a survey of all of Alberti’s buildings using new 3D laser scanner technology and the expertise of the DIAPReM Centre. The basic idea was that of creating a databank which turned Mantua and Ferrara into two specialised centres for anyone who wants to study the buildings of Leon Battista Alberti, although in truth we are dealing with something even more important and
that could have great repercussions on the cities in which we live.