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"What are the possible transfers of learning when life is a collage of different tasks? How does creativity flourish on distraction? What insights arise from the experience of multiplicity and ambiguity? And at what point does desperate improvisation become significant achievement? These are important questions in a world in which we are all increasingly strangers and sqjourners. The knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way, may be a better model for our times than the knight who is questing for the Grail."
-Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life (1989)
In 1964, Eugenio Garin announced the discovery of Leon Battista Alberti's Intercenales and published the four previously missing books for the first time.1 Until then, the figure of Alberti was overshadowed by the glorious image of the "universal man" popularized by Jacob Burckhardt.2 The discovery of the new Intercenales, a series of fantastic stories, fables, and short dialogues written by Alberti between about 1430 and 1440, has ultimately capsized that glorious image and helped paint a new portrait of Alberti as the idiosyncratic creator of "a crude Stonehenge, populated by lurid and gesticulating goblins," as Anthony Grafton once graphically put it.3 A shift from a solar, industrious, jovial, and sanguine Alberti to a selenic, disruptive, saturnine, and melancholic one has now taken shape; a shift which, in its turn, has justified among current scholars of the Italian Renaissance a transfer of interest from Alberti-the-architect to Alberti-the-humanist, a humanist, more accurately, of philosophical import.4
Like most intellectual maps, this one is not only crude in its strong binary configuration but actually fails to secure the stability of the field one would finally hope to chart;5 for in the context of Italian historiography, and particularly in the histories of Italian humanism, this contradictory image of Alberti comes to represent nothing less than a hermeneutical conundrum that reenacts and corroborates the already evocative, but now quite unavailing, analogy between Alberti and the chameleon, coined by Cristoforo Landino as early as in 1481:
I recall the style of Battista Alberto, who like a new chameleon assumes the colors of what he writes about.6
The colors of the architect and the colors of the writer seem utterly irreconcilable. On the one hand, Giorgio Vasari, the founder of art history,...