Synopses & Reviews
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was one of the most exciting figures of the Italian Renaissance. He wrote the first modern treatise on painting, the first modern manual of classical architecture, and a powerful set of "dialogues" about the princely families of Florence. But Alberti also made his own spectacular advances in the art of painting and in engineering, and was responsible for some of the most exciting architectural designs in Italy.
In this volume, one of our most distinguished Renaissance scholars offers the superlative biography and cultural history that Alberti has long deserved. It is a compelling portrait of a mysterious and original intellectual.
Review
Anthony Grafton treats Alberti's writings as mosaics fashioned out of passages collected from ancient sources. He shows that, in the compositional interstices between such passages, Alberti expresses his most immediate social concerns: with his own position and with the reception of the work by his first readers. By focusing on the interstices rather than on the body of the texts, Grafton draws the most convincing portrait to date of Alberti as a man in a social environment. Jack M. Greenstein
Review
[Grafton] has produced a convincing and engaging account of Alberti's intellectual milieu in what is arguably the most important general contribution to Albertian studies of recent decades. Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments I. Who Was Leon Battista Alberti? Making an Identity in the 1430s
II. Humanism: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Scholarship
IlI. From New Technologies to Fine Arts: Alberti Among the Engineers
IV. On Painting: Alberti and the Origins of Criticism
V. Interpreting Florence: From Reading to Rebuilding
VI. The Artist at Court: Alberti in Ferrara
VII. His Lost City: Alberti the Antiquary
VIII. Alberti on the Art of Building
IX. The Architect and City Planner
Epilogue
Notes
Index