Leon Battista Alberti (Italian: [leombatˈtista alˈbɛɾti]; 14 February 1404 – 25 April 1472) was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer; he epitomised the nature of those identified now as polymaths. He is considered the founder of European cryptography, a claim he shares with Johannes Trithemius. He is often considered primarily an architect. However, according to James Beck, "to single out one of Leon Battista's 'fields' over others as somehow functionally independent and self-sufficient is of no help at all to any effort to characterize Alberti's extensive explorations in the fine arts". Although Alberti is known mostly as an artist, he was also a mathematician and made significant contributions to that field. Among the most famous buildings he designed are the churches of San Sebastiano (1460) and Sant'Andrea (1472), both in Mantua. Alberti's life was told in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
Biography
Early life
Leon Battista Alberti was born in 1404 in Genoa. His mother was Bianca Fieschi. His father, Lorenzo di Benedetto Alberti, was a wealthy Florentine who had been exiled from his own city but was allowed to return in 1428. Alberti was sent to boarding school in Padua, then studied law at Bologna. He lived for a time in Florence, then in 1431 travelled to Rome, where he took holy orders and entered the service of the papal court. During this time, he studied the ancient ruins, which excited his interest in architecture and strongly influenced the form of the buildings that he designed. Leon Battista Alberti was thought to be a tall, strong athlete skilled in horseback riding. gifted in many ways. He distinguished himself as a writer while still a child at school, and by the age of twenty had written a play that was successfully passed off as a genuine piece of Classical literature. In 1435 he began his first major written work, Della pittura, which was inspired by the burgeoning pictorial art in Florence in the early fifteenth century. In this work, he analysed the nature of painting and explored the elements of perspective, composition, and colour. In 1438, he began to focus more on architecture and was encouraged by the Marchese Leonello d'Este of Ferrara, for whom he built a small triumphal arch to support an equestrian statue of Leonello's father. In 1447 Alberti became architectural advisor to Pope Nicholas V and was involved in several projects at the Vatican.
First major commission His first major architectural commission was in 1446 for the façade of the Rucellai Palace in Florence. This was followed in 1450 by a commission from Sigismondo Malatesta to transform the Gothic church of San Francesco in Rimini into a memorial chapel, the Tempio Malatestiano. In Florence, he designed the upper parts of the façade for the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, famously bridging the nave and lower aisles with two ornately inlaid scrolls, solving a visual problem and setting a precedent to be followed by architects of churches for four hundred years. In 1452, he completed De re aedificatoria, a treatise on architecture, using as its basis the work of Vitruvius and influenced by the ancient roman buildings. The work was not published until 1485. It was followed in 1464 by his less influential work, De statua, in which he examines sculpture. Alberti's only known sculpture is a self-portrait medallion, sometimes attributed to Pisanello.
Alberti was employed to design two churches in Mantua, San Sebastiano, which was never completed and for which Alberti's intention can only be speculated upon, and the Basilica of Sant'Andrea. The design for the latter church was completed in 1471, a year before Alberti's death: the construction was completed after his death and is considered as his most significant work.
Alberti as artist As an artist, Alberti distinguished himself from the contemporary ordinary craftsmen educated in workshops. He was a humanist who studied Aristotle and Plotinus. He was among the rapidly growing group of intellectuals and artists who at that time were supported by the courts of nobility. As a member of a noble family and as part of the Roman curia, Alberti enjoyed special status. He was a welcomed guest at the Este court in Ferrara, and spent time with the soldier-prince Federico III da Montefeltro in Urbino. The Duke of Urbino was a shrewd military commander, who generously funded artists. Alberti planned to dedicate his treatise on architecture to him. Among Alberti's minor but pioneering studies were an essay on cryptography, De componendis cifris, and the first Italian grammar. He collaborated with the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli in astronomy, a science close to geography at that time. He also wrote a small Latin work on geography, Descriptio urbis Romae (The Panorama of the City of Rome). Just a few years before his death, Alberti completed De iciarchia (On Ruling the Household), a dialogue about Florence during the Medici rule. Alberti took holy orders and never married. He loved animals and had a pet dog, a mongrel, about whom he wrote a panegyric (Canis). Vasari describes Alberti as "an admirable citizen, a man of culture... a friend of talented men, open and courteous with everyone. He always lived honourably and like the gentleman he was." Alberti died in Rome on 25 April 1472 at the age of 68.
Publications
Alberti considered mathematics as the foundation of arts and sciences. "To make clear my exposition in writing this brief commentary on painting," Alberti began his treatise, Della Pittura (On Painting) dedicated to Brunelleschi, "I will take first from the mathematicians those things with which my subject is concerned." Della pittura (also known in Latin as De Pictura) relied on the study classical optics to approach the perspective in artistic and architectural representations. Alberti was well-versed in the sciences of his age. His knowledge of optics was connected to the tradition of the Kitab al-manazir (The Optics; De aspectibus) of the Arab polymath Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham, d. c. 1041), which was transmitted by Franciscan optical workshops of the thirteenth-century Perspectivae traditions of scholars such as Roger Bacon, John Peckham, and Witelo (similar influences are also traceable in the third commentary of Lorenzo Ghiberti, Commentario terzo).
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
