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7 unusual facts about Leon Battista Alberti


Alberti

Leon Battista Alberti, an Italian author, artist and poet of the Renaissance

Anthony Grafton

His many books include a profound study of the scholarship and chronology of the foremost classical scholar of the late Renaissance, Joseph Scaliger (2 vols, 1983–1993), a revisionist account (with Lisa Jardine) of the significance of Renaissance education (From Humanism to the Humanities, 1986), and, more recently, studies of Girolamo Cardano as an astrologer (1999) and Leon Battista Alberti (2000).

Cosimo Bartoli

He also published a collection of translations of works by Leon Battista Alberti under the title Opuscoli Morali di Leon Batista Alberti, gentil’huomo firentino.

Leon Battista Alberti

In his treatise De pictura (1435) he explains the theory, of the accumulation of people, animals, and buildings, which create harmony amongst each other, and "hold the eye of the learned and unlearned spectator for a long while with a certain sense of pleasure and emotion".

De pictura ("On Painting") contained the first scientific study of perspective.

Mario Carpo

His publications include The Alphabet and the Algorithm (MIT Press, 2011), Architecture in the Age of Printing (MIT Press, 2001; also translated into other languages), a commentary on Leon Battista Alberti's Descriptio Urbis Romae (2000, in French; and 2007, in English, co-authored); La maschera e il modello (1993); Metodo e ordini nella teoria architettonica dei primi moderni (1993).

Pedro Nunes Tinoco

His vault in the Santa Cruz monastery is described by The Dictionary of Art as “more rigorously in the manner of Alberti than the informal version characteristic of those Portuguese buildings that immediately followed the introduction of his style by Filippo Terzi.


Cicco Simonetta

His notes were anticipated by Leon Battista Alberti in his theoretical, but more comprehensive treatise De Cifris, which earned him the title of Father of Western Cryptology.

Leonello d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara

Leon Battista Alberti wrote his De Re Aedificatoria under Leonello's commission, and at the Ferrarese court worked artists such as Pisanello, Iacopo Bellini, Giovanni da Oriolo, Andrea Mantegna, Piero della Francesca and the Netherlandish Rogier van der Weyden.

Relief

The revival of low relief, which was seen as a classical style, begins early in the Renaissance; the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, a pioneering classicist building, designed by Leon Battista Alberti around 1450, uses low reliefs by Agostino di Duccio inside and on the external walls.


see also