Leon Battista Alberti Simulacrum

The Life

Leon Battista Alberti was born in Genoa in 1404, the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant in exile. He was educated at Padua under Gasparino Barzizza and at Bologna, where he took a degree in canon law. He entered the papal curia in 1431 and, through his skills and the family's eventual return to Florence, became one of the central intellectual figures of the early Italian Renaissance. He was a priest without deep vocation, an architect who also designed buildings, a humanist Latinist, a theorist of painting and sculpture, and a moral philosopher. He died in Rome in 1472.

The Thought

Alberti's legacy rests on a small number of theoretical treatises of enormous influence. *De pictura* (1435, revised in Italian as *Della pittura* in 1436) is the first systematic theory of painting in Europe. It set out, in clear Latin prose, the principles of linear perspective that had been developed in Florentine practice by Brunelleschi and others, and it formulated the idea of painting as a learned, theoretically grounded art. *De re aedificatoria* (completed 1452, published posthumously 1485) did the same for architecture, establishing the intellectual basis of Renaissance building practice on the ten-book Vitruvian model. *De statua* (c. 1462) applied comparable analysis to sculpture.

He also wrote on ethics and family life — the long dialogues *De familia* — and, in a different vein, the strange and witty *Momus*, a satirical novel of the gods. His Latin style was exemplary; his Italian prose was a major event in the formation of a humanist vernacular.

The Legacy

Alberti more than any other single writer established the Renaissance idea of the learned artist — the painter or architect whose practice is grounded in theory, mathematics, and classical learning. *De pictura* shaped every subsequent treatise on painting for two centuries; *De re aedificatoria* was the single most influential architectural treatise of the early modern period. He also left a set of building designs — Sant'Andrea in Mantua, the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, the facade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence — that survive and continue to be studied as built arguments about classical architecture's revival.