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| Leon Battista Alberti Self-portrait ca. 1435 bronze relief-medallion National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
"Alberti was the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant. He was born in 1404 in Genoa, where his father had moved after the decree of exile which had been passed on the whole Alberti family, one of the richest and most powerful in Florence. He was educated in the north of Italy, principally in Bologna, where he studied Law. He seems to have gone to Florence in 1428, when the ban on his family had been lifted, and the next few years, which must have been of vital importance in his formation, coincided with the end of that period when Florence was dominated by the big merchants, who had achieved a greater power than they had held for nearly a century."
"The rest of Alberti's life was spent for the most part either in Florence or following the Papal Court, in which he held a secretarial post from 1432 to 1464. Papal policy was at this period increasingly concentrated on central Italy, and relied largely on the merchant class and its support. The outlook, too, in Papal circles was Humanist in character, so that Alberti found there a similar atmosphere to that of his own city, Florence."
"In his width of knowledge, as well as in his rational and scientific approach, Alberti was typical of the early Humanists. He worked apparently with equal ease in the fields of philosophy, science, classical learning, and the arts. He wrote pamphlets and treatises on ethics, love, religion, sociology, law, mathematics, and different branches of the natural sciences. He also wrote verses, and his intimacy with the Classics was so great that two of his own works, a comedy and a dialogue in the manner of Lucian, were accepted as newly discovered writings of the ancients. In the arts, he practised and wrote about painting, sculpture, and architecture."
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| Leon Battista Alberti Façade detail 1446-51 Palazzo Ruccelai, Florence |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Façade detail 1446-51 Palazzo Ruccelai, Florence |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Façade 1450 Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Relief detail 1450 Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Façade 1458-70 Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Florence |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Façade detail 1458-70 Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Florence |
"The outstanding characteristic of Alberti's life is this rationalism, based more on ancient philosophy than on the teachings of Christianity. But this does not imply that he was opposed to Christianity. On the contrary he constantly pays his respects to it, but it is before a curious form of Christianity that he bows, a typical Humanist religion in which elements of pagan and classical philosophy blend without any difficulty with Christian dogmas, in which churches are referred to as 'Temples' and in which sometimes 'the gods' in the plural seem to receive as much honour as the Christian God. With this humanized religion Alberti felt himself entirely at home, but he will not give up the right to individual judgement on every matter. Even the ancients, for whom he has a deeper reverence than for any other persons, human or divine, he treats on a level and does not feel himself obliged to follow either their precept or their example if his own judgement tells him otherwise."
"We shall find many of Alberti's ideas on these general philosophical and political subjects reflected in his theoretical writings in the aesthetic field, but before we go on to them we must consider the actual works which he left behind him in the arts. In painting and sculpture nothing survives from his hand, but in architecture his contribution is considerable. His position is that of a younger member of the group which, under the leadership of Brunelleschi, dominated Florence at the time of his return there in 1428. He carried on their work and developed many of their principles a stage further."
"Alberti was a more fully self-conscious classicist than Brunelleschi and his contemporaries. He was more learned in the study of antiquity than they, more scientific in his application of the archaeological knowledge which he had acquired. In architecture he eliminates the last traces of the Gothic, which were still so evident in Brunelleschi, especially in the dome of the cathedral. He was far more scrupulous in his treatment of the orders; and in the Palazzo Rucellai he adapted them for use on a façade of more than one story, by using a single order for each – a method which was later universally adopted."
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| Leon Battista Alberti Ruccelai Sepulchre, Apse 1467 San Pancrazio, Florence |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Ruccelai Sepulchre, Façade 1467 San Pancrazio, Florence |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Ruccelai Sepulchre, detail 1467 San Pancrazio Florence |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Ruccelai Sepulchre 1467 San Pancrazio, Florence |
"Alberti does not explicitly define and describe this beauty which is not attainable in art by mere imitation. In the treatise on painting he does not pursue the matter, but evidently assumes that his readers will know beauty when they see it. In the later and much more elaborate De Re Aedificatoria he gives two definitions of beauty which are roughly those to be found in Vitruvius. In one case he describes beauty as 'a certain regular harmony of all the parts of a thing of such a kind that nothing could be added or taken away or altered without making it less pleasing.' In the second definition he says: 'Beauty is a kind of harmony and concord of all the parts to form a whole which is constructed according to a fixed number, and a certain relation and order, as symmetry, the highest and most perfect law of nature, demands.' Perhaps more important is another passage in the same treatise in which he expands the idea, again with reference to architecture: 'What pleases us in the most beautiful and lovely things springs either from a rational inspiration of the mind, or from the hand of the artist or is produced by nature from materials. The business of the mind is choice, division, ordering, and things of that kind, which give dignity to the work. The business of the human hand is the collecting, adding, taking away, outlining, careful working, and things of that kind, which give grace to the work. From nature things acquire heaviness, lightness, thickness, and purity.'"
– quoted passages are from the chapter on Alberti in Anthony Blunt's Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940)
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| Leon Battista Alberti Façade 1472-92 Basilica of Sant'Andrea, Mantua |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Interior 1472-92 Basilica of Sant'Andrea, Mantua |
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| Leon Battista Alberti Interior 1472-92 Basilica of Sant'Andrea Mantua |
Leon Battista Alberti never could have seen the realization of his stupendous barrel-vault above. He died the year construction began, and it took another twenty years to complete. That he left such monuments behind him – even that his name is till regularly invoked today in tones of awe – weighs against the blankness of his personal annihilation only in imagination.