Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance

by Anthony Grafton

A lucid biographical study of a key figure of European culture

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) was one of the most original, creative, and 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 that dominated his home city of Florence. He rediscovered the forgotten aesthetics of classical architecture and described, in incomparably vivid terms, the artistic revolution in Florence that began what we now call the Renaissance. But Alberti was more than a mere chronicler--he practiced what he preached. He made spectacular advances in the art of painting and in engineering, and as an architect he was responsible for some of the most exciting buildings in Italy. Yet in spite of his central importance, work on Alberti has for the most part been confined to scholarly monographs. Here, one of our greatest Renaissance scholars offers the general book that Alberti has so long deserved. This is a compelling portrait of a mysterious, original, and highly unusual intellectual, and a colorful tableau of the cities and courts in which he lived and worked.

Genres: Architecture, Biography, History, Renaissance, Art History, Nonfiction

417 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Anthony Thomas Grafton is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Exhaustive and exhausting as intellectual history! Grafton plods through an analysis of just about every scrap written or read by Alberti and seems to delight more in the intricacies of humanistic Latin than in presenting the Man in context. Grafton's knowledge of Renaissance and Classical literature is deep and embracing, so if you wish to understand 15th century Italy through the lens of an Aristotelian treatise or Xenophon's histories (only a close comparison of Xenophon and Alberti's texts, posits Grafton, reveal the full patterns of Florentine clan life), this is your book. However, if you wish to understand the real world in which Alberti operated, I'd suggest giving this book a pass (at least until you get that Ph.D. in Classics). As a remarkably thorough intellectual history of 14th and 15th century Humanist writing and its relation to Alberti, Grafton's 'biography' succeeds, but I take issue with calling this a " superlative biography and cultural history" or "a colorful tableau of the cities and courts in which he lived and worked" (taken from the dust jacket - one wonders if Dr. Grafton penned the lines himself).

[Duncan Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Savoring this enormously erudite and well written account of Alberti's amazing life and times as a budding humanist in early Renaissance Florence. Brings together so many strands that remained disconnected in my memory, and adds humanity to the Burckhardt's heroic portrait from some 150 years ago.