Leon Battista Alberti he thought particularly deserving. Alberti stood out for two reasons.
First because, in addition to his other writings, he composed a Descriptio Urbis Romae, a Description of the City of Rome, which covered the main buildings of antiquity and the principal churches built during the Christian Era, along with the city walls and gateways, the course of the Tiber, and other matters. This was a huge step up from what had been the only guidebook to the antiquities of Rome, the legend-infested Mirabilia, or Marvels, of the Eternal City, a text infested with hearsay and extreme inaccuracies. Alberti’s guide became a much-needed prelude to the Jubilee year of 1450 which Nicholas had just announced. “There was not the least remain of any ancient structure,“ Alberti would write with pardonable pride, “that had any merit in it, but what I went and examined, to see if anything was to be learned from it. Thus I was continually searching, considering, measuring, and making draughts of everything I could hear of, until such time as I had made myself perfect master of every contrivance or invention that had been used in those ancient remains.” It is probably no exaggeration to say that Alberti ended up knowing more about ancient Roman building than most ancient Romans had.
The second reason lay in the pope’s own archaeological interests. In addition to all his other talents, Alberti had the novel distinction of being the world’s first underwater archaeologist. The object of his search was an ancient Roman galley from the time of Trajan, which 1,300 years before had sunk, presumably during a naumachia, a mock naval battle, to the muddy floor of Lake Nemi. Its location was known because it kept fouling fishermen’s nets. But nobody had figured out a way to raise it, and without underwater goggles divers could not see more than a vague bulk looming in dark water. Commissioned to do so by Cardinal Prospero Colonna, Alberti brought it up with grappling hooks, cables, floating barrels, and winches. Only the prow came clear of the water before the hull broke in half and sank again, and Alberti was able to observe—the first account of ancient Roman naval construction—that it was built of pine and cypress “in an excellent state of preservation” and covered with tar-soaked linen, which was then sheathed in lead secured by bronze nails.
Although this feat must have caused a good deal of buzz and flutter in court circles, what most cemented Alberti’s position as Nicholas V’s adviser on building was his large and ever-growing knowledge of architecture, its theory, practice, and history. In addition, he had no illusions about whom he was designing and, if possible, building for. “Do everything possible,” he exhorts the reader,
to obtain commissions only from the most important people, who are generous and true lovers of the arts. For your work loses its value when done for persons of low social rank. Can’t you see the advantages to be had in the furthering of your reputation if you have the support of the most influential people?
Moreover, “the safety, authority, and decorum of the state depend to a great extent on the work of the architect.” With the patronage and encouragement of Nicholas V, Alberti became the successor to Brunelleschi, with the difference that he was also the first architect of the Renaissance papacy. (Brunelleschi, despite his great influence on other architects, did not design for popes.) Certainly, though Alberti believed in the supremacy of Roman norms and forms, he also believed strongly in individual taste and would never have considered imposing a strict, formulaic canon of beauty. A building might well have the proportions of a human being, but what kind of human?
Some admire a woman for being extremely slender and fine shaped; the young gentlemen in Terence preferred a girl that was plump and fleshy; you perhaps are for a medium between these two extremes, and would neither have her so thin as to seem wasted with sickness, nor so strong and robust as if she were a Ploughman in disguise, and were fit for boxing: in short, you would like her such a beauty as might be formed by taking for the first what the second might spare. But then, because one pleases you more than the other, would you therefore affirm the other to be not at all handsome or graceful? By no means…
It seems fairly certain that Alberti had the strong hand in crucial restorations of a dilapidated Rome, although we do not know how many. Nicholas had ambitious plans for the city’s renovation. One of the keys to it was the aqueduct of the Acqua Vergine, which had been so important to the water supply of the ancient city. Now tracts of it had fallen in, and much of the rest was blocked by sinter or accumulated lime deposits. Those who lived in districts once served by the Acqua Vergine were obliged to drink the filthy water of the Tiber, teeming with bacteria. Prompted by Alberti, Nicholas V ordered a complete rerouting of the aqueduct, entering Rome near the Porta Pinciana and finishing at the Campo Marzio in three outlets called the Fontana di Trevi, designed by Alberti but later to be demolished and replaced by Nicola Salvi’s enormous stone festivity, into which Anita Ekberg waded for Fellini’s camera and generations of tourists threw their coins.
Alberti oversaw the restoration of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, which brought traffic across the Tiber to the Castel Sant’Angelo, formerly Hadrian’s Tomb. He was also busy restoring ancient and infirm churches for Nicholas V, such as Santo Stefano Rotondo, the circular church with its majestic ring of internal columns erected in early Christian times.
Nicholas V had no doubts about the importance of architecture—a new architecture, one which would center and stabilize the faith of Christians. In 1455, he declared:
To create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses there must be something that appeals to the eye.… A popular faith sustained only on doctrines will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials … belief would grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it.
But the great work on which Nicholas V and Alberti hoped to embark was the replanning and construction of Saint Peter’s, the navel of Christianity. By the fifteenth century, Constantine’s original basilica was in poor repair, and Alberti saw that whole sections of it had to be rebuilt. “A very long, big wall,” he noted, “has, very unadvisedly, been built over a number of large voids,” with the result that the buffeting of north winds over the centuries had pushed it six feet out of plumb—so that any extra pressure or subsidence could bring it crashing down. Alberti recommended that the whole wall be bound in with new masonry, and Nicholas ordered that more than two thousand cartloads of building stone be quarried from the Colosseum and brought to the site of Saint Peter’s. But the gigantic task of rebuilding the old Constantinian basilica was not achieved; the pope died, and the responsibility for the great church passed into other and even more ambitious papal and architectural hands.
The architectural ones were those of Donato d’Angelo (1444–1514), commonly called Bramante—a nickname that meant “Ardent” or “Intensely Desiring.” (His maternal grandfather had been nicknamed Bramante, too: perhaps intensity was a family trait.) He was a farmer’s son, born in a village of the Papal States near Urbino. He undoubtedly witnessed the construction of the Ducal Palace, and he would have had some contact with artists who attended its highly cultivated court at the invitation of its ruler and patron, Federigo da Montefeltro, including Alberti and such figures as Piero della Francesca. He was one of a constellation of early-Renaissance figures who were born in or around the 1440s—Perugino, Botticelli, Signorelli, and, in 1452, Leonardo da Vinci. Later, when he moved to Milan, he came to know Leonardo, but how well one cannot say. Probably a small book on ancient Roman architecture that appeared anonymously around 1500 and was dedicated to Leonardo was by Bramante. Certainly both men worked for the Sforza court in Milan in the 1490s. Presumably Bramante got his introduction to Duke Ludovico through his aunt Battista Sforza (d. 1472), who had married Federigo da Montefeltro. Bramante was to spend more than two decades in Milan, doing some building for Duke Ludovico Sforza. He did not become a star there; as an outsider to the city, he did not secure the big commissions. However, he did design the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro, and was involved with the design of the Milanese monastery and church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo painted his disastrously ill-preserved Last Supper—that now almost vanished icon of the High Renaissance. Bramante designed a tribune at the end of the nave which was originally meant to be a mausoleum for the Sforzas.