1. Humanism and the Universal Man. Most (but not
all) of the complete personalities Burckhardt referred
to had been educated in the classical, humanistic
learning of their time. Burckhardt noted that the
learning of the universal man was no longer identified
with the encyclopaedic knowledge of the medieval
thinker, but he did not establish a connection between
humanism and the rise of the many-sided or all-sided
man. He did not credit humanism with fashioning an
ideal of the complete man nor with providing a curric-
ulum appropriate to it. If anything, he tended to be-
lieve that no such objective was entertained by those
who would seem to have striven to fulfill it.
It was an English historian of Renaissance classical
education who showed that the full development of
the personality which Burckhardt described corre-
sponded to the avowed objectives of humanist
educators. William Harrison Woodward's Vittorino da
Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (1897) is based
upon a close study of the famous teacher and upon
humanistic treatises on education (many of which he
translated and published in this work). He found in
these writings, as in Vittorino's teaching, a conscious
revival of both the ancient rhetorical tradition of gen-
eral education (encyklios paideia) and its underlying
ideal of the whole man. Vittorino called his method
of education “encyclopaedic,” by which he meant a
balanced combination of intellectual, moral, and phys-
ical training. Another humanist educator, Battista
Guarino, explicitly identified humanistic learning with
Greek paideia and Roman humanitas; and Maffeo
Vegio, in a treatise De educatione liberorum (ca. 1460),
hailed the humanistic restoration of the “universal”
education of the ancients (qui orbis doctrinarum appel-
latus est).
In point of fact, humanistic education was far from
universal or encyclopaedic in the sense of all-en-
compassing. If anything, it represents a narrowing
of the Seven Liberal Arts of medieval secondary edu-
cation. It dropped the mathematical Quadrivium
(arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) and deleted
logic from the literary Trivium (grammer, rhetoric,
dialectics). But it greatly expanded the study of “let-
ters” by adding poetry, history, and moral philosophy
(which was understood as a form of eloquence) to
grammar and rhetoric, as well as by adding Greek to
Latin letters (Kristeller, 1961, 1965). The Renaissance
studia humanitatis was thus strictly literary and clas-
sical; but founded as it was upon the tradition of
classical eloquence, it revived and adopted the ancient
rhetorical ideas of general education. Its guiding prin-
ciple was the ideal of classical
humanitas: cultivation
of “the whole man, body and soul, sense and reason,
character and mind” (Marrou, 1948).
This “general” education (general because it was
neither technical nor professional in nature) was re-
garded by the humanists as the finest preparation for
public and private life. Bearing out Burckhardt's de-
scription of the union of theory and practice in the
humanists, Woodward noted the humanistic conviction
that the practical ends of the individual and society
would be furthered by a general, i.e., liberal education.
On the one hand, humanistic learning (particularly in
the secondary schools) was directed toward formation
of the person. The desire for distinction was encour-
aged by the humanists as a stimulus to learning, and
distinction required not only intellectual culture but
virtue, the cultivation of character, and the acquisition
of certain personal and social graces as well: eloquence,
dignity of bearing, accomplishment in various forms
of recreation and diversion. Moreover, the studia
humanitatis was to lead to the perfection of man as
a political being (as citizen, courtier, or ruler, as the
case may be). In this regard, the union of scholarly
and practical interests was built into the very system
of humanistic studies which is directed simultaneously
toward thought and action: literature and society, po-
etry and history, rhetoric and moral philosophy—all
were necessary for the complete man. Finally, classical
studies provided authorities for a wide range of matters
of social and public concern, from statecraft (Aristotle's
Politics) to management of a household (Plutarch and
Cicero), from agriculture (Vergil) to the art of war
(Caesar).
The humanists thus appear to be directly responsible
for popularizing the ideal of the well-rounded man.
And formal education was not their only instrument
for propagating and diffusing this ideal. They promoted
it in their writings as well; universalizing the general,
literary culture of the ancient orator, the humanists
recommended it (as P. O. Kristeller has pointed out)
in treatises addressed to diverse groups in Renaissance
society, to princes and citizens, to women, courtiers,
and artists—to all who professed “humanity.” Several
of Alberti's works exemplify this tendency, as does
Baldassare Castiglione's Il cortigiano (1528). Castig-
lione required the courtier to join to his customary
martial virtues and to his loyalty to his prince the
humanistic virtues of eloquence, a literary education,
and a certain accomplishment in painting, music, and
dancing. In the same spirit, although written a century
earlier and with a bourgeois audience in mind, Alberti's
De familia (ca. 1434) sets forth, in the idealized figures
of his own prominent merchant-banking family, a har
monious marriage of classical culture with the political,
economic, and social concerns of the urban patriciate.
One of his late works gives the reverse of this picture.
The subject of De iciarchia (1469) is the public respon-
sibilities (chiefly educational) of the humanist scholar.
Alberti also extended to the artist this conception of
the whole man. In De pictura (1435) he urged the
painter to become literate and acquire a general edu-
cation. This first treatise on painting was also the first
work to encourage development of that wide range
of interests and general competence which in fact came
to characterize the Renaissance artist.
The learning embraced by the artistic exponents of
the humanistic ideal was not always, and not even
typically, classical and literary, however. Alberti and
Leonardo, the two whom Burckhardt singled out as
most fully representative of his all-sided man, achieved
their universality outside the confines of humanistic
learning, as did Michelangelo who seemed to his age
the truly universal artist of all time. Alberti was a
humanist, to be sure. He was in fact the epitome of
the Renaissance humanist, animated as he was by the
desire to achieve that personal excellence which tri-
umphs over human frailty, death, and time, and bend-
ing all his liberal learning at the same time to practical
and social needs in characteristically humanistic fash-
ion. Alberti the Latinist wrote vernacular dialogues on
moral philosophy for the non literatissimi cittadini of
the lay society of his time; and it was for the sake
of justifying this use of the Tuscan tongue as an instru-
ment of learning and prose literature that he worked
out its first grammar. For the crafts of painting and
sculpture he provided a theoretical basis and, by
grounding them in the “sciences” of perspective and
anthropometry, drew them into the circle of the liberal
arts. Complementing this work, he applied the mathe-
matical learning of the schools, and his humanistic
knowledge of Ptolemy and Vitruvius, to problems of
surveying, map-making, and the construction of
measuring devices and simple machines. For a friend
who was a Papal Secretary, he devised the method of
coding by means of a cipher-wheel and of decoding
by frequency analysis. And for architects and builders,
he set forth in his famous De re aedificatoria (1452)
the engineering knowledge of antiquity and his own
day, the rules of classical architecture, and a theory
of universal Harmony which formed the aesthetic out-
look of his age and fostered its quest for propor-
tionality.
This quest for proportionality, however, which was
at once an aesthetic, a scientific, a moral, and a meta-
physical objective, as Alberti's writings attest, bespeaks
a mathematical rather than a humanistic treatment of
problems. It belongs to a current of thought which is
just as fundamental to Renaissance culture as humanism
but is logically distinct from it. Alberti embodies both
currents, as did the classical culture of antiquity. His
Platonic conviction that the intellectual should serve
as guide and teacher of his age gave an ethical, a
humanistic consistency to the diversity of his works.
But methodologically, once he moved outside the
sphere of literature, philology, and moral philosophy
to accomplish this task, mathematics became the
organon of all his undertakings. It was by holding to
a mathematical intuition of reality (which he recovered
from classical sources), by working it out in a variety
of technical problems (often in accordance with clas-
sical exemplars) that Alberti's thought developed in
several fields of learning—fields which were hitherto
quite disparate, but in which he, and Leonardo after
him, brought about a new methodological unity and
achieved a new, nonliterary kind of universality.
