Leon Battista Alberti

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was one of the most 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 of Florence. But Alberti also made his own spectacular advances in the art of painting and in engineering, and was responsible for some of the most exciting architectural designs in Italy. In this volume, Renaissance scholar Anthony Grafton offers the biography and cultural history that Alberti has long deserved. It is a compelling portrait of a mysterious and original intellectual.

This volume makes available the texts of two of his major works of artistic theory, which in part reflected and in part determined the practice of painting and sculpture and which are fundamental for the understanding of the theory and practice of Italian Renaissance art. In spite of their long acknowledge importance and frequent use, the texts themselves have remained comparatively neglected and not infreaquently misunderstood. -- Book Jacket.

"I libri della famiglia has long been viewed by Italians as a classic of Italian literature. It displays a variety of styles--high rhetoric, systematic moral exposition, novelistic portrayal of character--in the typical Renaissance framework of the dialogue. The chief merit of the work lies in its scope: it directly assays the personal value system of the Florentine bourgeois class, which did so much to foster the development of art, literature, and science. This translation is based upon the critical edition by Cecil Grayson, Serena Professor of Italian Studies, Oxford."--Jacket.

"Momus is the most ambitious literary creation of Leon Battista Alberti, the famous humanist-scientist-artist and "universal man" of the Italian Renaissance. In this dark comedy, written around 1450, Alberti charts the lively fortunes of his anti-hero Momus, the unscrupulous and vitriolic god of criticism. Alberti deploys his singular erudition and wit to satirize subjects from court life and politics to philosophy and intellectuals, from grand architectural designs to human and divine folly. This edition provides a new Latin text, the first to be based on the two earliest manuscripts, both corrected by Alberti himself, and includes the first full translation into English."--BOOK JACKET.

Con questo volume la Casa Editrice Carabba ripropone in copia anastatica l'edizione del 1913 de "Il trattato della pittura". Il testo fu pubblicato a cura di Giovanni Papini e con una prefazione dello stesso. L'Alberti scrisse questo testo nel 1435 in italiano - il cod. Magliabechiano IV, 38 è in volgare e porta la data del 1436 - e lo dedicò all'amico suo Filippo di Ser Brunellesco. Così l'Alberti espone la partizione dell'opera: "Vedrai tre libri ; il primo, tutto matematico, dalle radici entro dalla natura fa sorgere questa leggiadra e nobilissima arte. Il secondo libro pone l'arte in mano all'artefice, distinguendo sue parti e tutto dimostrando. Il terzo istituisce l'artefice quale e come possa e debba acquistare perfetta arte e notizia di tutta la pittura". A questi libri della pittura Papini ha fatto seguire un brevissimo trattatello sui cinque ordini architettonici.