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"Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472."
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Leon Battista Alberti : the chameleon's eye
A new account of the Renaissance writer and architect Leon Battista Alberti. One of the most brilliant and original authors and architects of the entire Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti had an output encompassing engineering, surveying, cryptography, poetry, humour, political commentary, and more. He employed irony, satire, and playful allusion in his written works, and developed a sophisticated approach to architecture that combined the ancient and modern. Born into the Florentine elite, Alberti was nonetheless disadvantaged due to exile and illegitimacy. As a result, he became an acute analyst of the social institutions of his time.
Book
Humanism and the Urban World
In Humanism and the Urban World, Caspar Pearson offers a profoundly revisionist account of Leon Battista Alberti’s approach to the urban environment as exemplified in the extensive theoretical treatise De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building in Ten Books), brought mostly to completion in the 1450s, as well as in his larger body of written work. Past scholars have generally characterized the Italian Renaissance architect and theorist as an enthusiast of the city who envisioned it as a rational, Renaissance ideal. Pearson argues, however, that Alberti’s approach to urbanism was far more complex—that he was even “essentially hostile” to the city at times. Rather than proposing the “ideal” city, Pearson maintains, Alberti presented a variety of possible cities, each one different from another. This book explores the ways in which Alberti sought to remedy urban problems, tracing key themes that manifest in De re aedificatoria. Chapters address Alberti’s consideration of the city’s possible destruction and the city’s capacity to provide order despite its intrinsic instability; his assessment of a variety of political solutions to that instability; his affinity for the countryside and discussions of the virtues of the active versus the contemplative life; and his theories of aesthetics and beauty, in particular the belief that beauty may affect the soul of an enemy and thus preserve buildings from attack.
eBook
Leon Battista Alberti : the chameleon's eye
A new account of the sui generis Renaissance writer and architect Leon Battista Alberti. One of the most brilliant and original authors and architects of the entire Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti had an output encompassing engineering, surveying, cryptography, poetry, humor, political commentary, and more. He employed irony, satire, and playful allusion in his written works, and developed a sophisticated approach to architecture that combined the ancient and modern. Born into the Florentine elite, Alberti was nonetheless disadvantaged due to exile and illegitimacy. As a result, he became an acute analyst of the social institutions of his time, as well as a profoundly existential writer who was intensely preoccupied with the human condition. This new account explores Alberti's life and works, examining how his personal and intellectual preoccupations continually pushed him to engage with an ever-broader spectrum of Renaissance culture.
eBook
Rome as “Part of the Heavens”? Leon Battista Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae (ca. 1450) and Ptolemy’s Almagest
In his Descriptio urbis Romae, Leon Battista Alberti provides step-by-step instructions for how to draw the outlines of Rome. The image transmitted through Alberti's text is so accurate that it is justly described as the first \"map\" of Rome after the Forma Urbis (3rd c. CE). Alberti's idea was sparked by the renewed reading of the works of Claudius Ptolemy: the Geography, but also-as I argue for the first time-the Almagest. I show how this image blends the ways that terrestrial and celestial territories are commonly depicted and gives a fresh interpretation of this cosmologically overdetermined city.
Journal Article
Beholding a Building in Admiration: Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria and the Renaissance Discourse on Magnificence
The sense of wonder and admiration experienced by individuals who witness a striking sight, whether natural or man-made, has long been regarded as playing a role in the acquisition of knowledge. Both Aristotle and Plato regarded wonder and admiration (thaúma), sparked by something
seen, as the origin of philosophical thinking. In the Middle Ages, theological writers considered the way in which admiration and, specifically, the state of rapture it engendered, helped the Christian experience devotion to God. What happened when a beholder was filled with admiration upon
encountering a magnificent building was addressed in discussions of magnificent patronage from at least the thirteenth century. The present Note investigates how Alberti's reflections on magnificence and admiration informed his theory of aesthetic design in De re aedificatoria, completed
in the 1450s. It proposes that Alberti redefined what makes a building admirable or 'magnificent' and also understood 'beholding in admiration' to be an active mode of looking. Therefore, his views on magnificent architecture were subtly different from those of Pope Nicolas V, in particular.
By considering Alberti's theory of aesthetic design as a reflection on magnificence and admiration, additional light is also shed on his confidence in the protective power of beauty and his design recommendations for the temple.
Journal Article
Pulchritudo y lineamenta. La reflexión estética de Leon Battista Alberti en el De re aedificatoria: Platón, Aristóteles, Euclides, Cicerón y Vitruvio
El propósito de la investigación es profundizar en los fundamentos filosóficos de la teoría arquitectónica de Leon Battista Alberti en el tratado De re aedificatoria, en particular en el Prefacio y el libro I, donde se discuten aspectos centrales del proceso de diseño entendido como creación intelectual y estética a través de los conceptos de pulchritudo y lineamenta. El punto de partida del análisis se sitúa en la relación establecida entre los principios de lineamenta y forma en la teoría retórica ciceroniana y en los conceptos de espacio, lugar, forma, cuerpo y proporción que tienen su origen en la tradición filosófica platónica y aristotélica, la geometría euclidiana y la teoría arquitectónica vitruviana. Se considera que desde la Antigüedad, la arquitectura estaba ligada a conceptos de naturaleza filosófica de los que derivaban sus principios.
Journal Article
Alberti and Military Architecture in Transition
Alberti’s contribution to the nascent science of fortifications in the 1450s is often ignored, but a careful reading of his descriptions of fortifications show that he was the first to describe the elements of fortification formally in the precise mathematical terms of shape, measurements, relationships, proportions. In forming his ideas, Alberti embraced both the old and the new. The old he re-elaborated and set in modern terms, and although he cites numerous ancient authors as sources for his information about fortifications, the obvious historical source for Alberti’s description of the elements of fortification is Vitruvius. On the other hand, Vitruvius alone cannot account for all of Alberti’s knowledge of military architecture. Plans with well-define geometric shapes, solid walls, scarped bases, curtains, towers open to the interior appropriated located on the bases of flanks, loopholes for grazing fire conjoined to systems of defense for dropping stones and other missiles vertically, structures in earth: all of these show that Alberti was in possession of a thorough knowledge of the state of fortifications in his day. All of these features are present in fortresses that had been built some years earlier based on designs attributed to Filippo Brunelleschi. We examine the fortress at Vicopisano to show a built example that Alberti may have seen and drawn on.
Journal Article
LA HISTORIA EN LA VENTANA: CONFIGURACIÓN Y REPRESENTACIÓN DEL TIEMPO EN LA VENTANA ALBERTIANA
This paper offers a reading of the renaissance painting according to the principles established by Leon Battista Alberti, one of the first theorists of perspective in painting which Trattato della pittura (1435) define the frame of the painting as \"an open window into history\". The concept of history employed by Alberti, which lends itself to many interpretations, is approached from the reflections of Erwin Panofsky about the prospect as \"symbolic form\", moving towards a hypothesis about the symbolic nature of the configuration and representation of time in the alberti's window.
Journal Article
The extrinsic in the architectural thinking of Leon Battista Alberti: a reading of Sant'Andrea in Mantua
In the treatise, De re aedificatoria, Alberti sought to establish what was intrinsic to the art of building. It can seem that his over-riding concern was to establish its material and formal nature. However, architecture also figures in his other writings. Surveying the wider panorama of Alberti's thought, it becomes clear that what was extrinsic to architecture, yet crucial to its character, was of no less importance. Consistent with his emphatic naturalism, context was to be kept in view. And context extended from nature to society. His history of architecture values functionalism and his theory of its evolution begins with the material concerns of shelter and store. Yet, as architecture serves, it possesses a moral principle. Alberti, conceiving the conceptual, material, and social and moral object, co-opts metaphor as the means to describe the building under all these headings. So, 'roof' acquires resonant meaning, as do 'hearth', 'table', and so on – both elements and moral actions of house and church. When Alberti's language is recognized as functioning in this way, it acquires for the reader a singular animation. In Florence Cathedral he finds an exemplary case. A famous and problematic late text – describing Sant'Andrea in Mantua – can be acquitted of the charge of rhetorical insincerity.
Journal Article
Arte, Ciência e Filosofia na Renascença Italiana. Em torno das teorias da arte de Leon Battista Alberti e de Leonardo da Vinci
This paper aims at discussing the relations between art, science and philosophy in the context of the Italian Renaissance. By analysing the writings of Leon Battista Alberti (De Pictura and De Re Aedificatoria) and Leonardo da Vinci (Trattato della Pittura), we attempt to examine and evaluate the proclaimed scientific status of the arti del disegno. Accordingly we consider and analyse several notions and conceptions that could be understood as the theoretical basis of the sustained scientific dignity of the visual arts: the notion of rational/mathematical beauty (the concinnitas – Alberti); the rule of proportion as metaphysical and practical/artistic principle; the perspective as the scientific basis of the pictorial practice; the observation of nature as an artistic exigency (painting as natural philosophy – Leonardo da Vinci).
Journal Article