Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance

Content apart, the pretentiousness of the presentation is a major flaw.The book is the outgrowth of a thesis, its chapters are launched with epigraphs in three languages, and the style is that variety of North -American -doctoral -program which goes by the name 'high- powered.'Thus, Tasso effects a 'sophisticated recul platonicien' at one point, and z-'recul mythologique' 2iX.another.By virtue of the 'pseudo-Orphic unction' of Shakespeare's style, a 'pastoral theocracy' of various gods 'invisibly impends'over the trembling fabric of A.M.N.D. no doubt.The laborious introductory chapter, which attempts to set up the theoretical framework for the whole book, is an exercise in hefting imponderables.The book is clearly only for specialists, but surely critical writing need not sound so fashionably mannered, so pointlessly recondite, as if it were shielding sacred formulas from the unin- itiated.After all, writing about allegory does not entail the writing of allegory.One or two extended sections are quite fine: the one on the function of the puzzling intermedi in the Aminta (pp. 63-71)is a place where the reader feels the ground turning solid under his feet.Again, it is salutary to see Shakespeare treated as at least as intelligent and knowledgeable an artist as Spenser, and to find that he too knows about such things as serio ludere, discordia concors, and the relative merits of activity and contemplation.Lastly, one of the merits of the book is that it represents an attempt to see Renaissance literature as a whole and not merely as a series of national fragments.For the real beginnings of that notion, all thanks to the art historians.