Filarete's treatise presents architecture, the new archaized mode of building, to Francesco Sforza as the means to historiate and recuperate his insurgent regime, which had overturned the preceding dynastic order of power. This thesis shows how the treatise tried to persuade a powerful but retardatory new prince not yet absorbed by the legitimizing narrative of a renascence of antiquity. It focuses on the treatise's narrative, and places it in its political situation, to show that Filarete made a dramatic, polemical opposition between building and architecture, which he will be shown to have defined as those techniques of assuring the arche.

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Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete (1400--1469), wrote that architecture is a gestational process, likening the architect to the mother and the father as the client. The process requires the architect-mother to " fantasticare e pensare e rivoltarselo per la memoria," fermenting ideas and incubating them in conjunction with one's memory. The intent is to understand mnemonics as a creative operation in Filarete's Trattato di Architettura. A key to this lies with Filarete's personal symbol, the bee. The bee's process of mellification acts as a metaphor of the architect's gestational design. The bee, long utilized as a memorative trope, points towards other memory models created throughout the treatise, culminating with the design for the House of Vice and Virtue. Directing the reader and inhabitants of the city in a social narrative, Filarete's architecture reveals the dependence upon remembrance and virtue for the city's creation and public rituals to sustain its life.

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