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Death, mortality, finitude-these are topics we seldom associate with Renaissance humanism, a movement often characterized as expressing an active engagement in the affairs of state, and as promoting an optimism about the human capacity for the improvement of self and others. In Renaissance Italy, in the first half of the fifteenth century, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Giannozzo Manetti and other humanists applied their talents in civil and ecclesiastical business, and they articulated, to varying degrees, how men, women, and children could morally better themselves and their world by studying the bonae artes.1
Their fellow humanist Leon Battista Alberti, however, presented another angle of vision on humanist studies. He worked alongside Poggio in the papal curia and dedicated writings to him and to Bruni. And yet he looked more skeptically and ironically at this optimistic engagement, and his writings turn, time and again, to the presence of death and the unremitting course of time. In his first commission, he wrote a Vita Sancti Potiti on the martyrdom of the young St. Potitus at the hands of Marcus Aurelius; he composed occasional pieces on the theme of death, including a Latin eulogy for his dog that was poisoned.2 His vernacular dialogue Della famiglia, whose passages have been cited as a credo of Renaissance faith in human abilities, is set in motion by the wishes of a dying man. In this dialogue, Alberti gives voice to his own father, Lorenzo, on his deathbed, anxiously instructing his brothers to care for his children.3 If the theme of patrimony or patriarchy has at times caught the attention of Alberti scholars, they have not sufficiently recognized that Alberti's father figures are aged (for example, Genipatro in his Theogenius, Agnolo Pandolfini in his Profugia), often dying-or, in the dialogue at the center of this article, the Defunctus, truly dead, and therefore look on life from beyond the threshold of death.4 The perspective of these characters, the mortal, or, if you will, the post-mortal viewpoint, allows Alberti to assess human- ist thought in a different light from his contemporaries. Instead of believing in moral improvement by way of classical learning, Alberti raises questions about this credo.
The Defunctus belongs to that gathering of writings called the Intercenales. These "dinner pieces," Alberti tells us,...