In this thesis I study Italian fifteenth-century ideas on cities and the built environment, especially from the viewpoint of two architectural treatises and their writers, Leon Battista Alberti and Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete. In the study which combines intellectual, material, and art histories, I show that Alberti and Filarete connected their ideas about architecture and an architect to the current ideas of persuasive eloquence promoted by the humanist movement. As the nature and tasks of a practising architect was not yet properly defined and institutionalised, they aimed to establish their own views as the dominant ones.
By studying different personal, philosophical, and political contexts of two architectural writers, I show that although they shared the common starting point and goals of the humanist ideal, they had very different ways to understand a city as a built entity and an architect’s role in designing and modifying it. I utilise a methodological tool to explain these major differences between Alberti and Filarete, through their different ways of perceiving and analysing a city: Alberti’s point of view was dominantly holistic, or he understood a city as a whole, coherent entity, while Filarete approached a city atomistically, as a conglomeration of conceptually unrelated buildings.
Alberti and Filarete proposed in their architectural treatises new approaches to building, especially to large-scale urban renovations initiated by autocratic lords. They envisioned a more prominent role for a court-architect, modelled after themselves. However, even if especially Alberti’s treatise became one of the most influential architectural books ever written, neither his nor Filarete’s vision became the standard. Alberti and Filarete’s strongly humanistic basis for architecture lost its momentum, yet studying their urban thinking reveals much about the current thinking of their time, and the direction the art of building was suggested to be pushed, before various reasons gave it a new form during the century following these first architectural treatises.