Overview and Form
The Intercenales (literally “Dinner Pieces” or “Between Meals”) is a collection of short prose pieces written by Leon Battista Alberti, primarily composed during the 1430s. These are brief satirical and philosophical dialogues, fables, and allegorical narratives written in Latin, representing some of Alberti’s earliest literary experiments. The collection comprises approximately one hundred short pieces of varying length, most quite brief—some only a page or two—though a few extend somewhat longer. The title itself suggests their occasional, informal character: these are literary morsels, intellectual entertainments meant to be consumed between more substantial fare, much as conversation pieces might enliven a dinner gathering.
The work stands as one of the most enigmatic and experimental productions in Alberti’s vast corpus. Unlike his more systematic treatises on architecture, painting, or family life, the Intercenales resist easy categorization. They blend Lucianic satire with Aesopian fable, philosophical dialogue with dream vision, creating a kaleidoscopic collection that moves rapidly between modes, tones, and subjects. The pieces are linked not by narrative continuity or systematic argument but by recurring preoccupations: the relationship between fortune and virtue, the corruption of contemporary society, the difficulty of achieving wisdom, the gap between appearance and reality, and the challenges facing the intellectual or artist in a hostile world.
Major Themes and Recurring Concerns
Throughout the Intercenales, Alberti returns obsessively to certain themes that clearly preoccupied him during this period of his life. The relationship between Fortune (Fortuna) and human agency appears repeatedly. Many pieces explore how chance, luck, and external circumstances constrain human action and undermine even the most careful planning and virtuous behavior. This is not simply philosophical speculation; the pieces often convey a bitter sense of personal experience, reflecting Alberti’s own struggles as an illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine family, seeking patronage and recognition in the competitive world of Renaissance courts and the papal curia.
The corruption and folly of contemporary society provides another constant target. Alberti satirizes the pretensions of the learned, the venality of courtiers, the hypocrisy of religious figures, and the general moral degradation he perceives around him. These critiques are rarely straightforward denunciations; instead, they emerge through ironic fables, absurdist scenarios, and allegorical narratives that require the reader to decode their satirical intent.
The difficulty of communication and the isolation of the wise man constitute another major preoccupation. Many pieces dramatize the impossibility of conveying truth to those unwilling or unable to hear it, the persecution of the virtuous by the corrupt majority, and the loneliness of the intellectual who sees through the illusions that comfort others. This theme connects to Alberti’s broader concern with the relationship between the individual and society, particularly the fate of the talented individual in a world governed by mediocrity and malice.
Representative Pieces and Their Content
While the collection is too extensive to summarize piece by piece, certain works stand out as particularly significant or representative of Alberti’s concerns and methods.
One of the most striking pieces involves a dialogue or narrative concerning Momus, the god of criticism and fault-finding from classical mythology. Momus appears in several of the Intercenales, serving as a figure for the satirist himself—the one who sees and speaks uncomfortable truths, earning the enmity of gods and men alike. In these pieces, Momus’s critical perspective exposes the follies and pretensions of the divine realm, functioning as a transparent allegory for the corruption of earthly courts and institutions. The Momus material in the Intercenales would later be expanded into Alberti’s longer work Momus, but here the god appears in shorter, more fragmentary episodes.
Several pieces take the form of beast fables in the Aesopian tradition, but with distinctly Albertian twists. Animals speak and act, revealing human vices and follies through their behavior. These fables often end ambiguously or darkly, without the clear moral tags of traditional Aesop. The natural world in these pieces is not a realm of simple moral lessons but a mirror of human complexity and corruption.
Other pieces employ dream vision frameworks. The narrator falls asleep and experiences an allegorical vision that comments on contemporary reality. These dreams often involve journeys to strange lands, encounters with personified abstractions, or visions of alternative social arrangements. The dream framework allows Alberti to present radical critiques and fantastical scenarios while maintaining a degree of distance and deniability.
Several pieces explore the theme of deception and disguise. Characters adopt false appearances, truth masquerades as falsehood and vice versa, and the difficulty of penetrating to reality beneath surfaces becomes a central concern. These pieces reflect Renaissance humanist interest in rhetoric and persuasion, but with a skeptical edge—language and appearance are as likely to obscure as to reveal.
Some of the Intercenales take the form of brief dialogues between named speakers, often historical or mythological figures, though sometimes contemporary types. These dialogues rarely reach resolution; instead, they dramatize conflicts between different perspectives or values, leaving the reader to judge between competing claims. The dialogue form allows Alberti to ventriloquize multiple viewpoints without necessarily endorsing any single position.
A number of pieces concern the relationship between wealth and virtue, poverty and wisdom. Alberti explores the paradox that material success often comes to the undeserving while the virtuous suffer deprivation. These pieces reflect both classical philosophical traditions (particularly Stoic themes about the independence of virtue from external goods) and the immediate economic anxieties of an intellectual dependent on patronage.
Several pieces address the theme of exile and displacement, clearly reflecting Alberti’s own family history. The experience of being cut off from one’s homeland, of living as a stranger among strangers, of lacking the security of established position—these experiences are explored through various allegorical and narrative frameworks. The exile becomes a figure for the intellectual’s broader alienation from a corrupt society.
Style and Literary Technique
Alberti’s Latin prose in the Intercenales is notable for its variety and experimentation. He moves between different registers and styles, sometimes within a single piece. Some passages employ the elegant periodic sentences of Ciceronian rhetoric; others adopt a more colloquial, rapid-fire style closer to Plautine comedy or Lucianic satire. This stylistic variety reflects the collection’s experimental character—Alberti is trying out different voices and modes, testing the possibilities of humanist Latin prose.
The pieces frequently employ irony and indirection. Meaning must be decoded; the surface narrative often points toward deeper allegorical or satirical significance. This indirection serves multiple purposes: it protects the author from direct accusations (particularly important given the often harsh social criticism), it engages the reader as an active interpreter rather than passive recipient, and it reflects Alberti’s broader skepticism about the possibility of direct communication of truth.
Many pieces employ paradox and reversal. Expectations are set up only to be overturned; apparent wisdom is revealed as folly and vice versa; the high are brought low and the low exalted, though rarely in ways that suggest simple moral justice. These reversals create a sense of instability and uncertainty that pervades the collection.
The brevity of most pieces is itself significant. Alberti rarely develops a single narrative or argument at length; instead, he offers glimpses, fragments, compressed scenarios that suggest larger meanings without fully articulating them. This fragmentary quality gives the Intercenales a modern feel—they resist the systematic completeness of medieval allegory or the sustained development of classical rhetoric.
Philosophical and Intellectual Context
The Intercenales emerge from the intellectual world of early fifteenth-century Italian humanism, but they occupy an unusual position within that world. Alberti was deeply learned in classical literature, and the Intercenales display that learning through their engagement with ancient genres and themes. The influence of Lucian of Samosata is particularly strong—Lucian’s satirical dialogues, with their irreverent treatment of gods and philosophers, their rapid shifts of perspective, and their skeptical intelligence, provided a crucial model for Alberti.
However, Alberti’s engagement with classical tradition is far from simple imitation. He adapts ancient forms to address contemporary concerns, and his vision is often darker and more pessimistic than his classical models. Where Lucian’s satire often maintains a certain playful detachment, Alberti’s frequently conveys genuine bitterness and disillusionment.
The Intercenales also reflect engagement with medieval literary traditions, particularly allegorical narrative and beast fable. Alberti synthesizes classical and medieval elements in ways that point forward to later Renaissance literature. The collection’s combination of learned classicism with vernacular energy, of philosophical seriousness with satirical playfulness, anticipates later developments in Renaissance prose.
Philosophically, the Intercenales engage with Stoic themes about virtue, fortune, and the proper attitude toward external goods. However, Alberti’s treatment of these themes is complicated by his evident awareness of the gap between philosophical ideals and lived reality. The pieces often dramatize the difficulty or impossibility of maintaining Stoic equanimity in the face of actual suffering and injustice.
Alberti’s Life and the Intercenales
Leon Battista Alberti was born in 1404, the illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine merchant family. This status as an outsider—illegitimate, exiled, dependent on his own talents rather than inherited position—profoundly shaped his life and work. He received an excellent humanist education, studying at Padua and Bologna, and entered the service of the papal curia, where he worked as an abbreviator (a kind of secretary) while pursuing his own literary, artistic, and intellectual projects.
The Intercenales were composed primarily during the 1430s, a period when Alberti was establishing himself as a writer and thinker but had not yet achieved the recognition that would come with his later treatises. The collection reflects the anxieties and frustrations of this period: the struggle for patronage, the experience of dependence and insecurity, the sense of possessing talents that the world fails to recognize or reward.
The pieces also reflect Alberti’s position as an observer of multiple worlds—the papal court, the humanist republic of letters, the emerging artistic culture of Florence and other Italian cities. His outsider status gave him a critical perspective on all these worlds, and the Intercenales record his often jaundiced observations.
Relationship to Alberti’s Other Works
The Intercenales occupy a distinctive place in Alberti’s corpus. His more famous works—the treatises On Painting, On Architecture, On the Family—are systematic, didactic, and constructive. They aim to establish principles, to teach, to build up bodies of knowledge. The Intercenales, by contrast, are fragmentary, satirical, and often destructive. They tear down rather than build up, question rather than establish, unsettle rather than instruct.
However, the concerns of the Intercenales connect deeply with Alberti’s other works. The preoccupation with fortune and virtue that runs through the dinner pieces also animates the dialogue On the Family, where Alberti explores how families can maintain themselves across generations despite fortune’s vicissitudes. The concern with the relationship between the individual talent and society that pervades the Intercenales also underlies On Painting, which seeks to establish painting as a liberal art worthy of respect and to define the painter’s proper social role.
The figure of Momus, who appears in several of the Intercenales, would be developed at much greater length in Alberti’s later work Momus, a sustained satirical narrative about the god of criticism. The Intercenales can thus be seen as a workshop where Alberti experimented with themes, characters, and techniques that he would develop more fully elsewhere.
The Intercenales also connect with Alberti’s interest in cryptography and codes, which he explored in other works. The pieces’ emphasis on hidden meanings, on the gap between surface and depth, on the need for interpretation, reflects this broader concern with how meaning is encoded and decoded.
Reception and Influence
The Intercenales were not published during Alberti’s lifetime, and their early circulation was limited to manuscript copies among humanist circles. This limited circulation reflects both the works’ experimental character and their potentially dangerous satirical content. The pieces’ indirect, allusive style made them suitable for circulation among learned readers who could appreciate their classical references and decode their contemporary applications, but less suitable for wider publication.
When the Intercenales were eventually published in the sixteenth century, they attracted attention primarily from scholars interested in Alberti’s complete works rather than achieving wide popular readership. The collection’s fragmentary character, its learned allusiveness, and its often dark vision made it less accessible than Alberti’s more systematic treatises.
However, the Intercenales have attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent decades as scholars have become more interested in the experimental, playful, and satirical dimensions of Renaissance humanism. The collection reveals a side of Alberti—and of early humanism more broadly—that contrasts with the confident, constructive image often presented in more public works. The Intercenales show humanist learning turned toward satire and critique, classical revival serving skeptical and subversive ends.
The work’s influence on later literature is difficult to trace precisely, given its limited early circulation. However, the Intercenales participate in a broader Renaissance tradition of learned satire and allegorical narrative that would flourish in later sixteenth-century works. The collection’s combination of classical form with contemporary critique, its use of allegory and indirection to convey dangerous ideas, and its fragmentary, experimental character anticipate later developments in Renaissance and early modern literature.
Significance and Legacy
The Intercenales matter for several reasons. First, they reveal the range and versatility of Alberti’s literary talent. The author of systematic treatises on painting and architecture was also capable of playful, experimental, satirical prose that resists systematization. This versatility reflects the Renaissance ideal of the universal man, capable of excellence in multiple domains.
Second, the collection provides invaluable evidence about the darker, more skeptical currents within early Renaissance humanism. The confident rhetoric of civic humanism, with its faith in education, virtue, and the revival of classical learning, coexists in this period with profound anxieties about fortune, corruption, and the individual’s powerlessness. The Intercenales give voice to these anxieties in ways that more public, programmatic works could not.
Third, the Intercenales demonstrate the experimental possibilities of humanist Latin prose. Alberti shows that the revival of classical Latin need not mean simple imitation of ancient models; instead, classical forms and styles can be adapted, combined, and transformed to address contemporary concerns and create new literary effects. This experimental spirit would be crucial for the development of Renaissance literature.
Finally, the collection offers a portrait of the intellectual as outsider and critic. The recurring figure of the wise man persecuted by fools, the truth-teller punished for his honesty, the talented individual denied recognition—these figures reflect Alberti’s own experience but also articulate a broader humanist self-understanding. The intellectual’s role is not simply to serve power or to celebrate existing arrangements but to maintain critical distance, to see through illusions, to speak uncomfortable truths even at personal cost. This vision of the intellectual vocation, dramatized repeatedly in the Intercenales, remains relevant beyond its immediate historical context.
The Intercenales thus stand as a significant but often overlooked work in the Renaissance literary canon—a collection that reveals the experimental energy, the critical intelligence, and the personal anxieties of one of the period’s most versatile minds, offering a counterpoint to the more systematic and public face of early humanism.
