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| Filarete. The Sforzinda map |
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete
Trattato di architettura [Treatise of Architecture]
Edited by Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi
Il Polifilo, 1972
[N.B. On Filarete see in this blog also: Antonio Bonfini. The translations of Filarete's Treatise of Architecture into Latin, Edited by Maria Beltramini, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2000]
[1] Filarete’s Treatise had been printed, although not in its entirety, by W. Oettingen in 1896, in a form "not entirely free from flaws” (Schlosser, La letteratura artistica, p. 136). In 1965 the English translation of the Treaty was published, edited by J. R. Spencer, and "accompanied by the facsimile reproduction of the code Magliabechiano" (p. XCII).
[2] The Magliabechiano code is also the source of this first integral print in vernacular.
[3] Text of the strip:
"With this first edition of Filarete's Treatise on Architecture (hitherto known only through translations or fragments) we complete the series, in which we already published De re aedificatoria by Alberti and the Treatises by Francesco di Giorgio, the series of the three capital treatises on architecture of the fifteenth century. Led by Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi on existing codes (whose variants are shown in apparatus), the edition fills a gap that was particularly felt.
The description of the project of a new city, to be built by the Sforza family, offers Filarete the possibility to propose new 'models' of buildings, and to address issues of a political and social nature, providing a living and direct witness of that time’s culture. That testimony is displayed through the personality of an architect of great imaginative flair, who however also wants to show himself as a 'builder'. There are many aspects of interest: from the variety of topics to the narrative and fantastic form, to finish with the dense historical references. It is also, for a stated educational purpose of the author, the first treatise on architecture written in Italian.
In the extensive and comprehensive introduction, Liliana Grassi (known among other things for the restoration of the Ospedale Maggiore by Filarete) has highlighted the most significant themes of the Treaty and its internal tensions. Proposing for the first time, on the basis of the description given in the text, the reconstruction drawings of the cathedral of Sforzinda and some details of the Ospedale Maggiore, she suggests, thanks to them, new analytical assumptions. The figure of Filarete, oscillating between mediaeval Christianity and the humanistic dream of pagan antiquity, is thus illuminated by a new light. In his eclecticism there is no contradiction between faith and consciousness of earthly individuality, between the cultural suggestions from the past and those of the Renaissance, "to put forward - it is said in the introduction - a kind of eclecticism by heresy, almost to predict future mannerist ‘crises’." His culture reveals a popular substrate that gives the theoretical work a creative impulse and a rare immediacy, sometimes tinged with human sympathy.
The edition is accompanied by a note to the text and numerous footnotes, as well as a thorough philological apparatus. The figured sheets of the Magliabechiano code are all reproduced, together with some of the most significant illustrations from other codes."
[4] For an information on the translation of Filarete 's treatise in Latin, which took place between 1488 and 1489, see Antonio Bonfini, La latinizzazione del trattato d’architettura di Filarete (1488-1489) (The latinization of the Filarete’s Treaty on architecture - 1488-1489), edited by Maria Beltramini. On the iconographic aspects related to the treaty, see Le illustrazioni del Trattato d’architettura di Filarete: storia, analisi e fortuna (The illustrations of the Treaty of architecture by Filarete: history, analysis and luck) always by Maria Beltramini.
[5] We report the review of the work appeared on 20th July 1973, and signed by Eugenio Garin in the newspaper Paese Sera. Supplemento Libri. The original article is conserved in the Collection of articles and other newspaper clippings of Luciano Mazzaferro, preserved at the Biblioteca Comunale Giulio Cesare Croce in San Giovanni in Persiceto.
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| Filarete The Sforzinda Tower |
PAESE SERA Supplemento libri
A Precious Treaty of 1400 Filarete’s Ideal City
This dissertation on ways to construct buildings, drafted five hundred years ago, sheds light on tensions and hopes of the time in which it was conceived, helping us to better understand the XV century
by Eugenio Garin
The publication of Filarete's Treatise on Architecture, with extensive introduction and copious notes by Liliana Grassi is, without doubt, worthy of particular note. The publication also includes, at the end, all sheets of the figured Magliabechiano manuscript and a selection of illustrations from other codes. The text of Filarete (very well organised, together wth Grassi, by Anna Maria Finoli) joins those released earlier in the same series, of Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, concluding, in some way, an exceptional endeavour and offering material of great weight not only to the scholars of history of architecture, but generally to those studying the life of the fifteenth century. Just think of the minute and thick pages, so rich in details, and so little used, that Filarete dedicated to the school; they would be useful to trigger a crucial discourse, however still far from being properly set up, on the function that is assigned to the architect - or that the architect claims to have - in the Renaissance city.
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| Filarete. La Rocca della Sforzinda |
It will be useful, first of all, to speak at the outset about the text. However strange as it may seem, it is published just now for the first time in the integrity of its accessible fifteenth century codes. They are reduced to two, both in Florence: a Magliabechiano code and a Palatine one in Florence’s National Library (but the curators take into account any evidence of the lost Trivulzianus and the inaccessible Valenciano, as well as the tradition of late copies and of a Latin version-remake for Matthias Corvinus, by Antonio Bonfini). So far, we had only a very partial edition (covering about one third), published in Vienna by Oettingen in 1890, and a recent (1965) English version with a commentary by J.R. Spencer, with facsimile reproduction of the Magliabechiano code. That such a singular text was still unpublished, that even in this beautiful print - due to the intelligent and courageous initiative of a private publisher - it was still not possible, for obvious reasons, to reproduce the designs in the places in which they are inserted in Magliabechiano (but they are all placed in 136 tables at the end of the second volume), it is a fact that would need a series of side considerations. Although, one of these days, we will have to talk - in the midst of an often tumultuous research, and many expensive and rhetorical centenary celebrations – about the strange fate we reserve to the documents of the national culture. As we permitted the destruction of the landscape, the massacre of cities, the pillage or destruction of art heritage, in the same way we have forgotten the monuments of literature and thought too. We treat poorly the history of our universities and colleges, we ignore not common evidence from scientific and philosophical inquiries, and – as soon as we leave the beaten track – we do not even have adequate editions of distinguished classics. It is English the publisher of the Italian Alberti [note of the editor: reference is made to the Opere volgari – vernacular works, published between 1960 and 1973 by Cecil Grayson] (for part of the Latin version we have to even resort to the fifteenth century edition of Massaini). Americans are not just the late publisher of the poetics and rhetoric of sixteenth century, but the greatest scholar of Fabrici d’Acquapendente and Malpighi, and the historian of Investiganti. Well-done, of course, if scholars from overseas and across the Alps are coming, provided they really come, the editors of our greatest scientists of the seventeenth century, or the diggers of the dark areas of literary and Latin doctrinal texts from the fourteenth century onwards (think of the immense work made by Kristeller), or the editors of lawyers, historians, scholars and treatise editors in general. What it is important is that we can have texts and tools. The only regret is that the financial means that foreign institutions make available to prepare editions - and, at the same time, scholars (let us not forget!) of the monuments of our culture, are more often spent by our public authorities for ephemeral touristic and rhetorical rallies. Those millions that are so difficult to find for discreet but active research institutions, and for young scholars who guarantee unremarkable but arduous labour of publication of texts and documents, those millions flow copious only into events to celebrate centenarians , with conferences (of course international ones), and maybe multiple occurrences competing with each other. Yet reasons of linguistic nature and of access to the archives would require enhancing, in terms of quantity, organisation and assistance, our national activity as publishers of sources and authors; as publishers of scholars of institutions and schools. These are activities that would at the same time, indeed, require scientific training and serious participation in the debate and international collaboration: in short, a few congresses and centenary celebrations less, and some editions and well-trained editor more. Anyway, finally, the Treaty of Filarete has now been published more than half a millennium after it was written. In fact, in the well documented and comprehensive introduction Liliana Grassi sets up the beginning of the writing after 1458, identifying her climax between 1460-61 and 1464. The modification of the recipients (the Medici first and then the Sforza later on) brought changes, and the publishers inform persuasively on the variations. "Using the expressions of the same author - notes Ms. Grassi - you can say that this" architectural book" consists of a long dissertation through dialogue, characterized by a didactic and moralistic intent, on "ways to build" and on "various reasons of buildings", on "proportions and quality and measures, hence deriving their founding values." In fact, and Grassi stresses it, there is much more: first of all the continuous interweaving of the technical with the fantastic, the nexus of the engineer with the poet, of the urban planner with the politician. It is not true at all what Bernard Gille wrote, that "we are on the line of pure Pythagorean tradition ... in which everything is arranged according to a rigorous logic." What Alberti did - with some other effect - in two different works ( the Momus on the one hand and the De re aedificatoria on the other one), the Averlino connects in his own way, including the strategic design of a politician into the discourse of the architect , making use of myth to define the dream of the future. Therefore, the dialogue in which the architect outlines the stages of the construction of Sforzinda, the city commissioned by the munificent lord (Francesco Sforza), is intertwined with the message of the "Golden Book". Not by chance, the book is discovered when, in the laying of the foundation stone of the new city, a box of marble is buried - among pots of wheat, water, wine, honey, olive oil and milk - with a bronze book reminiscent of worthy men of the time. The Golden Book of King Zagalia, the ideal city, the treasure indicate the paradigm of which things in time are an image intended to corruption. In this respect it is difficult not to think of the sunny city of Hermes from the four doors, as described in the magic compilation Picatrix, rightly mentioned by Ms. Grassi, that seems to circulate in northern Italy in the second half of the Fifteenth Century (but on the "hermetic" theme is to see the recent Filarete nascosto – the hidden Filaret – by Silvana Sinisi). On the other hand, in Filarete the theme of the "golden book" seems to be linked, in turn, with the theme of the fabulous cities of the East which, shortly thereafter, the canonical Toscanelli will resurface, always from the Million, to the canonical Martins , and so then , the dreams of Columbus.
In this knot of issues the work of Filarete is almost exemplary, with the image of the dark ages ( "among the ruins of Italy ... came a power”), with the revolt against the "barbarian practices” ("be cursed those who invented them!"), with the reference to 'letters of Cicero and Vergil' and 'the old practice', but also with the nostalgia of the golden age and its projection into the future, as the design of the perfect city. All in a mixture of astrology and hermetism, illusion of old and new insights, which are dominated by the idea of a life circle, in a world made of occult and manifest correspondences: living the microcosm as the macrocosm, and generative act the building activity, and living creatures the building, the city, the world ("anthropomorphic point of absurdity" said CW Westfall). Hence the supreme function of the architect who understands and implements the cosmic measure. It is no coincidence - and I would like to emphasise this – that two symbolic figures (of a flavour referring to Alberti) find themselves almost identical at the centre of Sforzinda and on the "covertà" (the cover) of the golden book: Will and Reason that everything see, and that dominate the luck and the passion (heart) according to the rule of the righteous (pp. 266-7, 411).
In passages laden with irony, not unlike those of Filarete, Alberti had observed that, to make a better world, an architect, more than a philosopher, would need to serve God. Exactly for this reason these architectural treatises are presented with an encyclopaedic character, rich at the same time of news about men and things, and full of "political" meaning. Hence the need to understand the fifteenth century, to deal with the ambiguous variety which – taking a theoretical point of view - translates all tensions of an era into the problem of designing a city able to include harmoniously the entire operose human community in the live plot of the real.”
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