Filarete: The Architect of the Renaissance

Filarete: The Architect of the Renaissance as Demiurge and Educator is the first monograph investigating the Libro architettonico, written by Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino) between 1460 and 1464. The book is presented in the form of a dialogue between the author and the Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, along with his son Galeazzo Maria Sforza, concerning the planning, founding and construction of the city of Sforzinda, named after its patron, as well as a city connected with it located on the sea coast. Filaretes Libro was for a long period treated as if it were purely an architectural treatise and one that was regarded as extremely inferior in comparison with Leon Battista Albertis De re aedificatoria (c. 1450). In the process, anything in the book for which there was no place in the later tradition of the genre, or which could not be linked to any actual buildings, was hastily dismissed as imaginary or romantic, and certainly as representing worthless literary digression introduced by an uneducated and long-winded author allegedly to amuse the reader. This postdoctoral thesis is a study in cultural history and iconology devoted to the passages and illustrations in the Libro to which little if any attention has previously been given: its numerous astrological, alchemistic and generally magical elements; its cosmological, animal-allegory, and social-utopian aspects and the use of imagery as a teaching strategy; and its paradisal and Arcadian landscape descriptions, which are not found in any other Renaissance texts on architecture. Through a close reading of these images in the context of the text as a whole and its illustrations, on the one hand, and through a study of source texts that goes well beyond the usual art-historical reference points, on the other, the aim is to show that Filaretes Libro architettonico is an outstanding and crystalline document of its age, in the transition between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The text broadens and corrects the view of the Renaissance that we have today shaped by the victors of history. One of the central findings of the study is that the images that Filarete devises in order to illustrate topics in architectural theory in the stricter sense are by no means the accidental products of an exaggerated and eccentric imagination. Rather, they are the work of an author who was highly conversant with Humanist debates and extremely well-read, although perhaps an autodidact. They are not merely interspersed in the text to amuse the reader, but on the contrary all serve a higher-level message and a new and unprecedented claim: they proclaim the immense importance of architecture for the development of humanity and society, and the avant-garde role of the architect within the project of the Renaissance.