ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a close critical analysis of Alberti’s methodical argumentation, from his foundational distinction between design and matter with recourse to the soul and body analogy to the systematic and motivated distinctions between modeling and drawing, judgment and opinion, nature and culture, and ultimately the beautiful and the ugly. This chapter points out the aporias and the unavoidable contradictions that Alberti’s argumentation confronts along the way. It expounds how Alberti tries to resolve these with ultimate recourse to nature and theology, only to have to confront the aporia of ornamentation with no resolution short of his own theory assuming the role of the very ornamentation he tries to marginalize and control, in theory.
