Alberti, Ornament, Nature, and Law: A Reading of De re aedificatoria

Abstract

apparatus of collective perpetuity. The jurists held that each position was occupied in turn inside a coordinated ensemble of positions . . . , each one found to be “placed,” “superseded,” “acceded” as by a constant turnover or complementarity which imparted to each subject a position already formerly held by another: a continual permu-tation that maintained as such an extended arrangement according to the fully fictional mode of subrogation. . . . According to this logic, what comprised unity among the beings of the city was not properly speaking their community of existence. It was rather, to take up a formulation from Seneca, close to the artificializing manner of Roman law, the fiction according to which these beings, even while being separate and distinct according to nature, natura diducti et singuli , were juridically and ex officio maintained in place, iure aut officio , inside of a collectivity: within one of those discontinuous collectivities (herds, armies, senates, tribunals, cities), which some jurists, following Stoic philosophy, called “bodies composed of distant elements.” But less common is the idea, proper to Roman law, that an institution exists and persists independent of its natural substrate. 63