Alberti, Leon Battista (redirected from Leon Alberti)

Alberti, Leon Battista

(born Feb. 14, 1404, Genoa—died April 25, 1472, Rome) Italian architect, art theorist, and humanist. After pursuing a literary career as papal secretary, in 1438 Alberti was encouraged to direct his talents toward the field of architecture. His designs for the Palazzo Rucellai (c. 1445–51) and the facade of Santa Maria Novella (1456–70), both in Florence, are noted for their harmonic proportions. His central-plan church of Sant'Andrea, Mantua (begun 1472), with its triumphal-arch motif, is an early Renaissance masterpiece. Alberti was one of the foremost theorists on Renaissance architecture and art, known for codifying the principles of linear perspective (in On Painting, 1436). A prototype of the Renaissance man, he also made contributions to moral philosophy, cartography, and cryptography.

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Alberti, Leon Battista 

Born Feb. 18, 1404, inGenoa; died Apr. 25,1472, in Rome. Italian scholar, architect, writer, and musician. Alberti studied humanities in Padua and law in Bologna. Later he lived in Florence and Rome. A prominent figure in Renaissance culture, he defended the literary rights of the “native” (Italian) language. In a number of theoretical treatises (On a Statue, 1435, and On Painting, 1435–36, in Italian; On Architecture, published in 1485, in Latin), Alberti summarized the experience of the art of his time, enriched by scientific achievements. In Latin, he wrote the comedy The Lover of Fame (1426) and Momus (written between 1443 and 1450), a mythological and allegorical satire on princes and courtiers. Among his works in Italian, On Family (books 1–4, 1437–41) portrays the model family and advances the ideal of man in harmony.

In architecture, Alberti gravitated toward bold experimental judgments. In the Rucellai palace in Florence (1446–51, built by B. Rossellino according to Alberti’s plans), the facade was interspersed for the first time with three tiers of pilasters of various orders; the pilasters together with the rustic wall were perceived as the building’s constructive base. In reconstructing the facade of the Church of Santa Maria Novella (1456–70), Alberti used the incrustation style in the revetment and employed volutes for the first time to join the middle parts of the facade with the lower laterals. Alberti’s works, especially the church of San Francesco in Rimini (1447–68, remodeled from a Gothic church), and the churches of San Sebastiano (1460) and Sant’ Andrea (1472–94) in Mantua, all constructed according to his designs, were an important step in the assimilation of the heritage of antiquity by early Renaissance architecture.

WORKS

Opuscoli morali. Translated by C. Bartoli. Venice, 1568.
Opere volgari, vols. 1–2. Ban, 1960–66.
Desiat knig o zodchestve, vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1935–37.

REFERENCES

De Sanktis, F. Istoriia ital’ianskoi literatury, vol. I. Moscow, 1963.
Vseobshchaia istoriia arkhitektury, vol. 5. Moscow, 1967.
Mancini. G. Vita di Leon Battista Alberti. Florence, 1911.
Stokes, A. Art and science: A study of Alberti, Piero della Francesea, and Giorgione. London, 1949.

V. A. LEBEDEV and G. V. RUBTSOVA