Leon Battista Alberti
(Encyclopaedia
Britannica)
born Feb. 14, 1404, Genoa
died April 25, 1472, Rome
Italian Humanist, architect, and principal initiator of
Renaissance art theory. In his personality, works, and
breadth of learning, he is considered the prototype of
the Renaissance “universal man.”
Childhood and education
The society and class into which Alberti was born
endowed him with the intellectual and moral tendencies
he was to articulate and develop over a lifetime. He
belonged to one of the wealthy merchant-banker families
of Florence. At the time of his birth, the Alberti were
in exile, expelled from Florence by the oligarchical
government then dominated by the Albizzi family.
Alberti's father, Lorenzo, was managing the family's
concerns in Genoa, where Battista was born. Shortly
thereafter he moved to Venice, where he raised Battista
(Leo or Leon was a name adopted in later life) and his
elder brother, Carlo. Both sons were illegitimate, the
natural offspring of Lorenzo and a Bolognese widow, but
they were to be Lorenzo's only children and his heirs.
An affectionate and responsible father, Lorenzo provided
his sons with a Florentine stepmother (whom he married
in 1408), and he attended carefully to their education.
It was from his father that Battista received his
mathematical training. The useful intellectual tools of
the businessman inspired in him a lifelong love for the
regular, for rational order, and a lasting delight in
the practical application of mathematical principles.
“Nothing pleases me so much,” Alberti was to have a
figure in one of his dialogues remark, “as mathematical
investigations and demonstrations, especially when I can
turn them to some useful practice as Battista here did,
who drew from mathematics the principles of painting
[perspective] and also his amazing propositions on the
moving of weights.” As in Leonardo da Vinci's case,
mathematics led Alberti into several seemingly disparate
fields of learning and practice. At one stroke, it
resolved a diversity of problems and awakened an
appreciation of the rational structure and processes of
the physical world.
His early formal education was Humanistic. At the age of
10 or 11, Alberti was sent to boarding school in Padua.
There he was given the classical Latin training that was
to be denied to Leonardo, illegitimate son of a poor
notary in a rustic village of Tuscany. The “new
learning” was largely literary, and Alberti emerged from
the school an accomplished Latinist and literary
stylist. Relishing his skill as a classicist, he wrote a
Latin comedy at the age of 20 that was acclaimed as the
“discovered” work of a Roman playwright—and was still
published as a Roman work in 1588 by the famous Venetian
press of Aldus Manutius. But it was the content rather
than the form of the classical authors that absorbed
Alberti as a youth and throughout his life. As for most
Humanists, the literature of ancient Rome opened up for
him the vision of an urbane, secular, and rational world
that seemed remarkably similar to the emerging life of
the Italian cities and met its cultural needs. He
brought his own emotional and intellectual tendencies to
“the ancients,” but from them he drew the conceptual
substance of his thought.
Alberti completed his formal education at the University
of Bologna in an apparently joyless study of law. His
father's death and the unexpected seizure of his legacy
by certain members of thefamily brought him grief and
impoverishment during his seven-yearstay at Bologna, but
he persisted in his studies. After receiving his
doctorate in canon law in 1428, he chose to accept a
“literary” position as a secretary rather than pursue a
legal career. By 1432 he was a secretary in the Papal
Chancery in Rome (which supportedseveral Humanists), and
he had a commission from a highly placed ecclesiastical
patron to rewrite the traditional lives of the saints
and martyrs in elegant “classical” Latin. From this
point on, the church was to provide him with his
livelihood. He took holy orders, thus receiving in
addition to his stipend as a papal secretary an
ecclesiastical benefice, the priory of Gangalandi in the
diocese of Florence, and some years later Nicholas V
conferred upon him as well the rectory of Borgo San
Lorenzo in Mugello. Although he led anexemplary, and
apparently a celibate, life, there is almost nothing in
his subsequent career to remind one of the fact that
Alberti was a churchman. His interests and activities
were wholly secular and began to issue in an impressive
series of Humanistic and technical writings.
Contribution to philosophy, science,
and the arts
The treatise “Della famiglia” (“On the Family”), which
he began in Rome in 1432, is the first of several
dialogues on moral philosophy upon which his reputation
as an ethical thinker and literary stylist largely
rests. He wrote these dialogues in the vernacular,
expressly for a broad urban public that would not be
skilled in Latin: for the non litteratis simi cittadini,
as he called them. Based upon classical models, chiefly
Cicero and Seneca, these works brought to the day-to-day
concerns of a bourgeois society the reasonable counsel
of the ancients—on the fickleness of fortune, on meeting
adversity and prosperity, on husbandry, on friendship
and family, on education and obligation to the common
good. They are didactic and derivative, yet fresh with
the tone and life-style of the Quattrocento (the 1400s).
In Alberti's dialogues the ethical ideals of the ancient
world are made to foster a distinctively modern outlook:
a morality founded upon the idea of work. Virtue has
become a matter of action, not of right thinking. It
arises not out of serene detachment but out of striving,
labouring, producing.
This ethic of achievement, which corresponds to the
social reality ofhis youth, found ready acceptance in
the urban society of central and northern Italy in which
Alberti moved after 1434. Travelling with the papal
court of Eugenius IV to Florence (the ban of exile
against his family was lifted with the restoration of
Medici influence), Bologna, and Ferrara, Alberti made
several congenial and fruitful contacts. The writings,
both the Latin and vernacular ones, that he dedicated to
his new associates are imbued with his characteristic
notions of work, practice, and productive activity;
andhe took upon himself in turn the technical and
practical problems that were absorbing his friends and
patrons. In Florence his close associations with the
sculptor Donatello and the architect Brunelleschi led to
one of his major achievements: the systematization of
the painter's perspective. The book On Painting, which
he wrote in 1435, set forth for the first time the rules
for drawing a picture of a three-dimensional scene upon
the two-dimensional plane of a panel or wall. It had an
immediate and profound effect upon Italian painting and
relief work, giving rise to the correct, ample,
geometrically ordered space of the perspectival
Renaissance style. Later perspectival theorists, such as
the painter Piero della Francesca and Leonardo,
elaborated upon Alberti's work, but his principles
remain as basic to the projective science of perspective
as Euclid's do to plane geometry.
His friendship with the Florentine cosmographer Paolo
Toscanelli was of comparable practical and scientific
importance. It was Toscanelli who provided Columbus with
the map that guided him on his first voyage. Alberti
seems to have collaborated with him in astronomy rather
than geography, but the two sciences were closely bound
at the time (and bound to perspective) by the
conceptions and methods of geometric mapping
rediscovered in the writings of the ancient astronomer
and geographer Ptolemy. Alberti's distinctive
contribution to this current of thought took theform of
a small treatise on geography, the first work of its
kind sinceantiquity. It sets forth the rules for
surveying and mapping a land area, in this case the city
of Rome, and it was probably as influentialas his
earlier treatise on painting. Although it is difficult
to trace thehistorical connections, the methods of
surveying and mapping and the instruments described by
Alberti are precisely those that wereresponsible for the
new scientific accuracy of the depictions of towns and
land areas that date from the late 15th and early 16th
centuries.
At the Este court in Ferrara, where Alberti was first
made a welcome guest in 1438, the Marchese Leonello
encouraged (and commissioned) him to direct his talents
toward another field of endeavour: architecture.
Alberti's earliest effort at reviving classical forms of
building still stands in Ferrara, a miniature triumphal
arch that supports an equestrian statue of Leonello's
father. Leonello inspired a great Humanistic undertaking
as well as a mode of artistic practice on Alberti's part
by urging him to restore the classic text of Vitruvius,
architect and architectural theorist of the age of the
Roman emperor Augustus. With customarythoroughness,
Alberti embarked upon a study of the architectural and
engineering practices of antiquity that he continued
when he returned to Rome in 1443 with the papal court.
By the time Nicholas V became pope in 1447, Alberti was
knowledgeable enough to become the Pope's architectural
adviser. The collaboration between Alberti and Nicholas
V gave rise to the first grandiose building projects of
Renaissance Rome, initiating among other works the
reconstruction of St. Peter's and the Vatican Palace. As
the Este prince was now dead, it was to Nicholas V that
Alberti dedicated in 1452 the monumental theoretical
result of his long study of Vitruvius. This was his De
re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture ), not a
restored text of Vitruvius but a wholly new work, that
won him his reputation as the “Florentine Vitruvius.” It
became a bible of Renaissance architecture, for it
incorporated and made advances upon the engineering
knowledge of antiquity, and itgrounded the stylistic
principles of classical art in a fully
developedaesthetic theory of proportionality and
harmony.
During the final 20 years of his life, Alberti carried
out his architectural ideas in several outstanding
buildings. The facades of Sta. Maria Novella and the
Palazzo Rucellai, both executed in Florence for the
merchant Giovanni Rucellai, are noted for their
proportionality, their perfect sense of measure. They
are worthy successors to the art of Brunelleschi,
initiator of the Florentine Quattrocento style of
architecture. Other buildings look forward to the 16th
century, particularly to Donato Bramante, the architect
of St. Peter's. The classical severity of Alberti's
Tempio Malatestiano,commissioned by Sigismondo Malatesta,
the ruler of Rimini, and thenew sense of volume and
amplitude of the majestic Church of San Andrea, which he
designed for Ludovico Gonzaga, the Humanist Marquess of
Mantua, announce the fullness of the High Renaissance
style. Alberti was not only the foremost theorist of
Renaissance architecture: he had become one of its great
practitioners as well.
Architecture preoccupied him during the 1450s and 1460s,
and he traveled a great deal to the various cities and
courts of RenaissanceItaly, but Rome and Florence
remained his intellectual homes, and he continued to
cultivate the interests they had always stimulated. In
Rome, where republican life was precluded by the papal
government, he was absorbed by technical and scientific
matters. His response to certain problems entertained by
members of the Papal Chancery led to two highly original
works in this category. One is a grammar book, the first
Italian grammar, by which he sought to demonstrate that
the Tuscan vernacular was as “regular” a language as
Latin and hence worthy of literary use. The other is a
pioneer work in cryptography: it contains the first
known frequency table and the first polyalphabetic
system of coding by means of what seems to be Alberti's
invention, the cipher wheel. Although he had been
dismissed from the Papal Chancery in 1464 because ofthe
retrenchment ordered by Pope Paul II, Alberti undertook
this study, of obvious importance to the papacy, at the
request of a friend who stayed on as a papal secretary.
In all his projects, Alberti employed his intellectual
gifts in some “useful” work—useful to the artistic,
cultivated, and courtly circles in which he moved,
including painters and builders, mapmakers and
astronomers, Humanists, princes, and popes. In all of
his work, his versatility remained bound to the social
outlook that characterized the “civic Humanism” of
Florence.
It is fitting that his final and finest dialogue should
be set in Florence and be written in the clear Tuscan
prose he had helped to regularize and refine. Although
the republicanism of Florence was now eclipsed, and
Alberti now moved as a familiar in the circle of the
princely Lorenzo de' Medici, De iciar chia (“On the Man
of Excellence and Ruler of His Family”) represents in
full flower the public-spirited Humanism of the earlier
bourgeois age to which he belonged. Alberti is its chief
protagonist, and no more appropriate figure is
conceivable. For this dialogue, more than any other,
celebrates the union of theory and practice that
Florentine Humanism had attained and the ethic of
achievement and public service that he himself had come
to exemplify. De iciarchia was completed just a few
years before his death. He died “content and tranquil,”
according to the 16th-century biography by Giorgio
Vasari.
Assessment
Alberti was in the vanguard of the cultural life of
early Renaissance Italy. He has been admired for his
many-sided nature, as has Leonardo da Vinci, who
followed him by half a century and resembles him in this
respect. Yet in Alberti's case, unity as much as
versatility typifies the man and his accomplishments.
Leonardo's genius carried him further than Alberti: he
saw more and saw more deeply. But Leonardo's vision has
a “modern,” fragmentary character, whereas Alberti
attained a completeness in thought and life that
fulfilled the Renaissance ideals of measure and harmony.
His intellectual and artistic pursuits were all of a
piece, and he struck a unique balance between theory and
practice, realizing this dominant aspiration of his age
at the very moment social and political events had begun
to cause it to fade.
Joan Kelly-Gadol
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Leon Battista Alberti
Self-Portrait
c. 1435 |
Giorgio Vasari
(1511-1574)
Life of Leon Battista Alberti
Florentine architect, 1404 - 1472
Alberti devoted himself to
the study of Latin and the practice of architecture, perspective,
and painting, and he left to posterity a number of books which he
wrote himself. Now none of our modern craftsmen has known how to
write about these subjects, and so even though very many of them
have done better work than Alberti, such has been the influence of
his writings on the pens and speech of scholarly men that he is
commonly believed to be superior to those who were, in fact,
superior to him.
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Leon Battista Alberti
Malatesta Temple
Interior
c. 1450
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Malatesta Temple
Tempio Malatestiano
(interior)
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"Leon Battista happened to arrive in Rome during the pontificate of Nicholas V,
who was turning the city upside down with his building projects, and he was
befriended by his holiness. Using [the architect] Bernardo Rossellini to carry
out the ideas supplied by Alberti, the Pope went ahead with many useful and
commendable projects." I-210
"Subsequently, Alberti went to serve Sigismondo Malatesta, ruler of Rimini, for
whom he designed the church of San Francesco, notably its marble facade, as well
as the arcade of large arches facing the south and containing the sarcophagi for
illustrious citizens." I-210
"Such was the quality of Alberti's work that it ranks without question as one of
the foremost churches in Italy. It has six very lovely chapels, the one
dedicated to St James being extremely ornate and containing many relics which
originally came from Jerusalem." I-210
"Then in 1457, the year when the German Johann Gutenberg discovered his very
useful method for printing books, Alberti similarly discovered a way of tracing
natural perspectives and effecting the diminution of figures, as well as a
method of reproducing small objects on a large scale; these were very ingenious
and fascinating discoveries, of great value for the purposes of art." I-210
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Leon Battista Alberti
Santa Maria Novella
Florence |
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Santa Maria Novella (door)
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"In Leon Battista's time, meanwhile, Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai wished to build
in marble, at his own expense, the principal facade of Santa Maria Novella; he
consulted Alberti, who was a close friend of his, and, receiving not only advice
but a model as well, Rucellai finally determined to have the work done as a
memorial for himself." I-210
"So a start was made, and the facade was finished in 1477, to the great
satisfaction of the people who were especially delighted with the door; and so
it is clear that Alberti took exceptional trouble over this project." I-210
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Palazzo Rucellai, Florence
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"For Cosimo Rucellai, Alberti designed the palace which was being built in the
street called La Vigna and also the loggia which is opposite the palace."
I-211
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Rucellai loggia
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"In this loggia he turned the arches over the closely spaced columns in the
facade and also over the corbels, in order to have a series of arches on the
outside and to follow the same pattern internally."
I-211
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Rucellai Chapel, San Pancrazio
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"For the Rucellai family Alberti also made a chapel in San Pancrazio which rests
on great architraves supported by two columns and two pilasters piercing the
wall of the church below...In the middle of the chapel is a marble tomb of an
elongated oval shape and resembling , as is written on it, the sepulchre of
Jesus Christ in Jerusalem." I-211
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Church of SS Annunziata, Florence
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"About this time Ludovico Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, determined that he would
have the tribune of the principal chapel of the Servite church of the Annunziata
in Florence built after Alberti's plans and model...This [was] a very ingenious
and difficult structure, taking the form of a circular temple with a ring of
nine chapels which opened off like niches." I-212
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Sant'Andrea, Mantua
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"Ludovico then brought Alberti to Mantua itself, where he made for him a model
for the church of Sant'Andrea and several other things."
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