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The true creation of a builder-poet's brain, it illustrates Leo Battista Alberti's definition of the charm of architecture, tutta quella musica, that melody and music of a graceful edifice. We are able to understand what Michelangelo meant when he remarked that all subsequent designers, by departing from it, had gone wrong.
Physically he was remarkable too, and one of his accomplishments was to jump over a man standing upright, while he was also able to throw a coin on to the highest tower, even, I suppose, the Campanile, and ride any horse, however wild. At the Bargello may be seen Alberti's portrait, on a medal designed by Pisanello.
"Oh, dear me! my lady, all in black?" said Micheline, pointing to the tight-fitting black satin worn by the English beauty. "Yes, my dear Princess; mourning," replied Lady Harton, with a vigorous shake of the hands. "Ball-room mourning one of my best partners; gentlemen, you know Harry Tornwall?" "Countess Alberti's cavalier?" added Serge. "Well?" "Well! he has just killed himself."
Alberti's Treatise on the Art of Building is a sufficient proof of their study of Vitruvius, and we know that Fabio Calvi translated that writer into Italian for Raphael. In the later Renaissance this study passed into purism. It must be confessed that this grandiose and picturesque structure is but a shell to mask an earlier Gothic edifice. Compare Vol.
I accept the theory of Alberti's authorship. A beautiful description of the religious temper, p. 74. What Pandolfini says about the beauty of the body is worthy of a Greek: what he says about exercise might have been written by an Englishman, p. 77. Pp. 82-89 are very important as showing how low the art of politics had sunk in Italy.
"Oh, dear me! my lady, all in black?" said Micheline, pointing to the tight-fitting black satin worn by the English beauty. "Yes, my dear Princess; mourning," replied Lady Harton, with a vigorous shake of the hands. "Ball-room mourning one of my best partners; gentlemen, you know Harry Tornwall?" "Countess Alberti's cavalier?" added Serge. "Well?" "Well! he has just killed himself."
Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching thrift to his sons in Alberti's charming treatise on "The Government of the Family," frequently groans over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry; and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible to cope with them a conclusion which would have greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal proprietors in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps.
While the troubadours and minnesingers had been singing at the courts of Angevine kings and Hohenstauffen emperors, of counts of Toulouse and dukes of Austria; a new civilization, a new political and social system, had gradually been developing in the free burghs of Italy; a new life entirely the reverse of the life of feudal countries. The Italian cities were communities of manufacturers and merchants, into which only gradually, and at the sacrifice of every aristocratic privilege and habit, a certain number of originally foreign feudatories were gradually absorbed. Each community consisted of a number of mercantile families, equal before the law, and illustrious or obscure according to their talents or riches, whose members, instead of being scattered over a wide area like the members of the feudal nobility, were most often gathered together under one roof sons, brothers, nephews, daughters, sisters and daughters-in-law, forming a hierarchy attending to the business of factory or counting-house under the orders of the father of the family, and to the economy of the house-under the superintendence of the mother; a manner of living at once business-like and patriarchal, expounded pounded by the interlocutors in Alberti's "Governo della Famiglia," and which lasted until the dissolution of the commonwealths and almost to our own times. Such habits imply a social organization, an intercourse between men and women, and a code of domestic morality the exact opposite to those of feudal countries. Here, in the Italian cities, there are no young men bound to loiter, far from their homes, round the wife of a military superior, to whom her rank and her isolation from all neighbours give idleness and solitude. The young men are all of them in business, usually with their own kinsfolk; not in their employer's house, but in his office; they have no opportunity of seeing a woman from dawn till sunset. The women, on their side, are mainly employed at home: the whole domestic arrangement depends upon them, and keeps their hands constantly full; working, and working in the company of their female relatives and friends. Men and women are free comparatively little, and then they are free all together in the same places; hence no opportunities for tête-
Among these I may here mention Gino Capponi's history of the Ciompi Rebellion, Giovanni Cavalcanti's memoirs of the period between 1420 and 1452, Leo Battista Alberti's narrative of Porcari's attempt upon the life of Nicholas V., Vespasiano's 'Biographies, and Poliziano's 'Essay on the Pazzi Conspiracy. Gino Capponi, born about 1350, was Prior in 1396, and Gonfalonier of Justice in 1401 and 1418; he died in 1421.
"Oh! honey," she exclaimed, as her chum appeared in the doorway, "don't you want to come with me?" "Where? Is there a theater party on the tapis?" Katherine inquired, as she watched a labored effort to tie a coquettish bow at her throat. "Oh! no; I have to go down to Madam Alberti's for my new hat. I want it for church to-morrow," Sadie explained. "I have permission, but can't go alone, you know.
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