Abstract

Alberti elevates architecture to significant human concern concluding that nothing is so important in this endeavor as prudent and mature thinking. Lying behind what Alberti means by prudent judgment is a millennium long intellectual tradition. In Aristotle's practical philosophy, ornate speech appeals to the soul naturally and yet, to maximize the persuasive potential in political discourse, an orator must prudently adjust the degree of ornament to the circumstances. ;Cicero describes rhetorical ornament as the brightness that must be added to speech so that the words seem what they should be. Ornament, then, is a sensual quantity, a metaphor if you will, having a natural and suasive capacity but whose particular content and shape is the collaborative result of a particular community's judgment. Alberti, in turn, insists that civic arts should address both the learned and unlearned. He intends that architecture, like political oratory, should be judged in sense and appeal democratically. ;Temperantia is another virtue that figures importantly in Alberti's treatise on architecture. Temperance was associated, in the late Middle Ages, with the virtuous benefit derived from technological inventions. Inventing became a means of making the practice of life, one might say public life in particular, more virtuously moderate. ;Revived also in the late Middle Ages was Aristotle's concept of the polis, by which he means a political configuration whose form as a composite body may be judged in sense. Aristotle was brought to bear in this period when the polis was taken to be a republican regime and a body composed of factions, citizens, and institutions. ;Alberti articulates architectural ornament as an essential quality in every sensible aspect of a building. The frugal ornamentation of civic buildings, that Alberti praises in Roman architecture, persuades by virtue of its artifice that this individual, or that institution, takes its proper place in the body politic. Alberti presents civic architectural ornament as an important means of achieving tempered virtue among citizens and an architect's prudence indispensable in making this analog to the political temperantia in a commonwealth