De commodis litterarum atque incommodis

In 1428, when the banished members of the Alberti clan (exiled at various stages between 1387 and 1401) were allowed to return to Florence, the young papal secretary Battista Alberti beheld his ancestral home for the first time. Impressed by its artistic achievements, he would soon compose his treatise on painting in both Latin and Italian, and would praise Brunelleschi, Donatello, Della Robbia, and Ghiberti. By contrast, he was disappointed by his initial encounters with his extended family and with the humanist circles centered on the learned chancellor Leonardo Bruni.
The first critical edition of this important work was published in 1976 by Laura Goggi Carotti, a modest volume of 117 pages (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore). This new edition is part of the series Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Leon Battista Alberti directed by a team of scholars headed by Roberto Cardini.
Volume 1 consists of six essays and the Latin text. Chapter 1, “La cronologia e il contesto storico-biografico,” dates the composition of the work in 1428-1429, when Alberti was in Florence, as recent archival discoveries of Lorenz Böhninger confirm. Chapter 2, “I testimoni manoscritti e a stampa,” describes in detail the three Quattrocentos witnesses: (a) the Genoese codex (G: Biblioteca Universitaria G IV 29) that shares with the famous Oxford Canonicianus 172 annotations entered by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s physician Pierleone da Spoleto (1445-1492); (b) the rather obscure Chicago MS (C: Newberry Library 44); and (c) the Opera (I) edited by Girolamo Massaini (d. 1527) with a dedication to Roberto Pucci (1463-1547) and printed in Florence ca. 1499-1501. Chapter 3, “Legami di tradizione tra i testimoni,” records the errors and variants of all three witnesses, concluding that C and I derive from a common source. Chapter 4, “La stampa Massaini come progetto editoriale,” uses the variants of the printed edition to demonstrate the editor’s systematic classicizing of Alberti’s text – thus rejecting Massaini’s “improvements” as extraneous to Alberti’s text. Chapter 5, “Fasi redazionali,” summarizes the evidence for two versions of the work. Chapter 6, “Conclusioni ecdotiche e criteri di edizione,” concludes that C and I derive from version A, but G from the revision A1. Volume 1 concludes with the critical edition of Alberti’s treatise (193-246).
Volume 2 contains an extensive running commentary on Alberti’s text, “Note linguistiche e di commento inter/intratestuale,” some 255 pages cued to lemmata drawn from the text. This richly detailed philological analysis draws parallels to Alberti’s other works, as well as to relevant texts by Aristotle and Quintilian among the ancients, and Bruni and Valla among the Renaissance humanists. While the range and depth of her source quotations are impressive throughout, there are particularly lengthy discussions of crucial issues such as Alberti’s conception of his own prose style (206-310) and evidence for his misogynism (408-414). In especially insightful passages of commentary, Regoliosi shows how Cicero’s Pro Murena influenced Alberti’s distinction between opinio and res ipsa (366-367) and his reflections on lawyers and the legal profession (406-407, 442-443).
Naturally, a text as rich as Alberti’s treatise conceals all sorts of hidden treasures. For example, in the central sections of his treatise, Alberti asserts that scholars are denied satisfactions that most people seek: pleasure (III), wealth (IV), and honors (V). Now, as sources of happiness, these three things – in the order: pleasure, honors, and wealth – are dismissed by Aristotle at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics 1.5. 1095b14-1096a11. Here is Bruni’s translation of the passage, which Alberti will have known, with the three key words highlighted:

Bonum & felicitatem non absque ratione ex modo uiuendi existimare uidentur. Nam uulgus quidem atque onerosissimi uoluptatem, quapropter & ipsi uitam adamant uoluptuosam… Elegantes autem uiri & rebus agendis apti honorem. Hic enim fere ciuilis uitae finis est. Sed uidetur leuior quam is que quaerimus finem, magisque in honorantibus quam in eo qui honoratur consistere… Pecuniis uero intendens uiolentus est. Ipsaeque profecto divitiae nequaquam sunt id quod quaerimus bonum. Vtiles enim & alterius gratia. Itaque magis illa quae supra diximus, fines quis existimet, quoniam propter se expetuntur. Sed apparet nec illa esse… (UPenn Ms. Codex 760, fol. 7-7v)

Besides Aristotle, there is another Greek source for Alberti’s articulation of his argument. His discussion of two of these topics – physical pleasures and civic honors – reveals a debt to Xenophon’s Hiero, or On the Tyrant, a Greek dialogue translated into Latin by Leonardo Bruni around 1403, as I show in “Seria et iocosa in Alberti’s De commodis and Intercenales,” published in Serio ludere. Sagesse et dérision à l’âge de l’Humanisme, edited by Casanova-Robin, Furlan, and Wulfram (Paris: Garnier, 2020), 45-66.
The volume concludes with six indexes that list manuscripts and imprints, works by Leon Battista Alberti and Carlo Alberti, textual sources, and proper and geographical names.