Alberti, Leon Battista

Alberti, Leon Battista (1404–72). Italian architect, sculptor, painter, and writer, the most important art theorist of the Renaissance. Born in Genoa, the illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine banker, he was educated in Padua and at Bologna University, and was an outstanding Latinist (at the age of 20 he wrote a Latin comedy that was acclaimed as a rediscovered Roman work). For most of his career he was based in Rome (he held a secretarial post in the papal court from 1432 to 1464), but he travelled extensively and had close contacts with the most advanced Florentine artists of the day, particularly Brunelleschi. His first artistic treatise was written in Latin as De pictura in 1435 and translated into Italian the following year (as Della pittura) with a dedication to Brunelleschi (Donatello, Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia, and Masaccio are mentioned alongside him). Alberti wrote on a wide variety of other topics, complementing De pictura with a lengthy treatise on architecture (De re aedificatoria) and a much shorter one on sculpture (De statua). De re aedificatoria was probably written in the late 1440s and was presumably finished by 1452, when it was presented to Pope Nicholas V; it became the first printed book on architecture in 1485. De statua is generally dated to the 1460s. In these works Alberti turned away from the medieval outlook in which art was considered a symbolic expression of theological truths. Instead he emphasized the rational basis of the arts, and the necessity for the artist to have a thorough grounding in such ‘sciences’ as history, poetry, and mathematics (De pictura contains the first written exposition of the principles of perspective).

At about the time he was writing De re aedificatoria Alberti began to work as an architectural designer, his first certain work in this field (c.1450) being the exterior remodelling of the church of S. Francesco in Rimini (now known as the Tempio Malatestiano; see Malatesta). His other buildings include the churches of S. Andrea and S. Sebastiano in Mantua, and in Florence the façades of S. Maria Novella and the Palazzo Rucellai—all of them ranking among the outstanding architectural works of the early Renaissance. Alberti also practised as a painter and sculptor, but little trace survives of his work in these fields. No paintings by him are extant, but two bronze self-portrait plaques are attributed to him (Louvre, Paris, and NG, Washington); judging by his apparent age, these are usually assigned to the mid-1430s, so they may well antedate (and perhaps influenced) Pisanello's first portrait medals.