Can beauty save the world ?

Abstract

In search of an archaeology of Dostoyevskian belief in the saving power of aesthetic emotion, we propose to focus on a " text " of the political mystique of beautifying places of power in the XV^th  century: leon Battista Alberti'sDe re aedificatoria (1452), which states in its book VI : " Beauty will obtain, even from bitter enemies, that they moderate their wrath and consent to leave it inviolate ". Architecture would thus have the power to make things inviolable. To grasp the scope of this hope, we need to recall the powers ofornamentum in the Middle Ages, but also its redefinition in the Quattrocento, when the visual arts were reoriented towards the rhetoric of persuasion. It is from this perspective that we offer an intellectual portrait of Alberti's humanist ambition, reading at the same time the artist's self-portrait as an acrobat in the Vita Leonis Baptistae Albertis and his " Entretiens sur la tranquillité de l'âme ", the De aedificatoria and the tribulations of ugliness portrayed in the political fable of Momus. What emerges is a more restless conception of the political purpose of the humanists' art of building, which did not wait for Machiavelli to work on its own denigration.

Contents

• " Is it true, Prince, that you once said that "beauty" would save the world ? " : Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky and the saving power of aesthetic emotion (Tzvetan Todorov, " "Beauty will save the world" ", Theological and Religious Studies, 2007)
• History of disenchantment : " Ennobled, exalted, yes. But who has been saved ? " (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Scream, 1972)
• Too ugly to last ? Back to the gilding trap
• La vitesse, l'architecture l'accident trumpiste (Paul Virilio, La fin du monde est un concept sans avenir, œuvres (1957-2010), Paris, Seuil, 2023)
• The praise of force and the end of rhetoric (Louis Marin, Le récit est un piège, Paris, Minuit, 1975)
• The enveloping beauty of " atmospheres of survival " (Peter Sloterdijk)
• " Beauty will obtain, even from bitter enemies, that they moderate their wrath and consent to leave it inviolate " (Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VI, 2)
• Birth of a political belief (Patrick Boucheron, " What beauty will save the world ? Sur une fausse naïveté de Leon Battista Alberti ", in Sean L. Field, Marco Guida, Dominique Poirel eds, L'Épaisseur du temps. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Dalarun, Turnhout, Brepols, 2023)
• Le traité d'Alberti comme texte instaurateur de la pratique architecturale (Françoise Choay, La Règle et le Modèle. Sur la théorie de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme, Paris, Seuil, 1980)
• The 1440-1520 moment  political fragilities and cultural ambitions (Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand fort Art in Italy, 1300-1600, Baltimore, 1995)
• Alberti, exile in a family of exiles, and the Intercenales
• On the art of placement : " He always takes the color found in the thing about which he writes" (Cristoforo Landino)
• Vita Leonis Baptistae Albertis: (self)portrait of the artist as acrobat
• " Dare to ornament " (Jean Nouvel, Mes convictions, Paris, Flammarion, 2025) : the ornamental and theornamentum
• " When the troubles of my mind torment me and keep me awake " : the Profugiorum ab ærumna and Alberti's melancholy
• L'architecture cosa mentale : the palaces of memory (Mary Carruthers, Machina memorialis. Meditation, rhetoric and the making of images in the Middle Ages, Paris, Gallimard, 2002)
• Alberti'sfinestra and the miracles of painting
• Ce que bâtir veut dire : lexique architectural et régimes politiques dans le De re aedifactoria (Patrick Boucheron, "  Von Alberti zu Macchiavelli : die architektonischen Formen politischer Persuasion im Italien des Quattrocento ",Trivium, 2, 2008)
• Against the " unbridled desire to build " : overflowing houses in Alberti'sVita
• The grammar of architectural connotations and the architect's deontology
• Questi Signori di Romagna sono como signori dipinti (Marco Folin, " Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, Pio II e il Tempio Malatestiano : la chiesa di San Francesco come manifesto politico ", in Antonio Paolucci and Salvatore Settis eds, Il Tempio Malatestiano a Rimini, Modena, 2011)
• " The poor, they didn't realize that they were preparing to be the prey of anyone who attacked them " : the Machiavellian denial
• Alberti criticizes Alberti : the Momus as " defondation " of the De re aedificatoria (Pierre Caye, " Sub tecta ingressi... Du pouvoir et de la dignité de l'homme chez Léon-Baptiste Alberti : du Momus au De re aedificatoria ", in La Dignité de l'homme, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 1995)
• " But now what to do ? " : after the tribulations of ugliness, back to decor.