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The title of this essay, "humanism and holiness," raises a question about the relation between the terms: are they discrete and separate, or do they overlap? Is there, in the work of Alberti, a gradual movement from one to the other, perhaps corresponding to his slow journey with the papal entourage from Florence to Rome in 1443?1 This is not to say that Florence was an abode of secular ideas through the mid-Quattrocento, and Rome the haven of religious interests. The life and work of Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, alone suffice to negate this categorical distinction.2 But I am interested in exploring Alberti's relocation in Rome as a spur to his applying his humanism more directly to questions of holiness, or supposed holiness, in the later 1440s.
While many scholars have studied the secular or civic aspect of fifteenth-century humanism,3 others have qualified this secular orientation by looking at a number of humanists at the papal court, for example Giannozzo Manetti and Lorenzo Valla.4 But where do we situate Alberti in the curia? Was he, like Poggio Bracciolini, a critic of Manetti's pieties, as Riccardo Fubini has claimed?5 Or did he advance a more religious humanism like Manetti, according to the argument of Christine Smith?6 Did he train his skeptical eye on the architectural schemes of Nicholas V, in line with the views of Manfredo Tafuri, among others?7
In addressing these questions, the essay examines a section from Alberti's Momus, the Latin novel he composed after his return to Rome.8 The itinerant curia of Eugenius IV had fled Rome in 1434. Scholars have often viewed the novel as an extended allegory on papal politics. It displays a feckless Jupiter managing affairs in heaven and earth with what we might call an amateur proto-Machiavellianism, pitting one faction of deities against the other, and changing his mind about destroying the world and building it anew. The title character Momus is by turns both scold and arch-flatterer. He is the epitome of simulation and dissimulation, a shadowy Odyssean figure who wears masks and spins tales at will. It makes good sense therefore that scholars have read the work as a roman à clef for Eugenius's successor, Nicholas V, and the papal court in their intrigues to renovate the...